The old kitchen articles confirms that horses have been domesticated in Sicily of the early bronze age
Take a second glance at the fragments of pottery excavated in 2005 rewritten a chapter in Mediterranean history. A team from the University of Southern Florida (USF) found traces of horse meat in ancient kitchen utensils of a bronze age site in Sicily. Their study, published in Plos ashows that horses were present on the Italian island a full millennium earlier than before, pushing their arrival at the start of bronze.
Discoveries like this underline how central horses have been in human life by shaping regimes, rituals and whole societies.
“The horse was one of the most transformative animals of ancient civilizations, shaping mobility, war, hunting, agriculture, economy and religion,” said archaeologist Davide Tanasi, who led the study, in a press release.
The role of horses in ancient civilization
The Bronze Age, around 3000 BCE in 1200 BCE, according to the region, marked a turning point for human development: complex companies prospered, extended agriculture and commercial networks extended to the continents. The equines, horses and donkeys played a key role in this transformation. Donkeys served as robust packages in rough terrain, while horses, appreciated for speed and endurance, revolutionized travel and war.
In the whole of Eurasia, the domestication of horses dates back to the 3rd in the 4th millennium before our era, however, so far, there was no solid evidence that prehistoric Sicilians had access to horses, and even less consumed them.
Learn more: Humans Horses domesticated – New Tech could help archaeologists to determine where and when
Traces of horse meat on old pottery
“The vast majority of the materials recovered were fragments of cooking and dishes,” said Tanasi in the press release. “Ships on foot, pitchers and cups.” These types of ships were typical in prehistoric rituals involving liquid offers.
The excavation of Tanasi to Polizzello Mountain in central Sicily occurred in 2005, but at the time, technology was not sufficiently advanced to identify organic materials hanging on pottery. He put the puzzle aside while continuing other projects, such as the identification of prehistoric wine residues in the dangerous underground and hallucinogenic caves of Monte Kronio in an Egyptian cup old 2000 years old.
Almost two decades later, in 2024, Tanasi brought the long -term fragments to a laboratory to the USF, where advanced proteomic analysis could finally reveal their secrets.
“The proteomic analysis of organic residues has revealed a clear biomolecular signature of horses in a substantial subset of the vessels,” he said. The strongest evidence comes from equine serum albumin, a large blood protein of horses.
The results show that the substances derived from horses were not only present, but actively treated and probably consumed in ceremonial and food contexts at the Castellucian colony on the Polizzello mountain.
Rewriting of the history of Sicilian horses
“The assembly of pottery contained a very large pedestal pool which, most likely, was at the center of the common rite. It must have contained food-based foods, perhaps in the form of a stew. Ritual participants took portions in smaller bowls, from which they consumed it,” said Tanasi in the press release. “We cannot say what happened during the rituals, but ethnographic studies inform us that prayer, songs and dances may have been carried out.”
Beyond the image of a shared bronze feast, the implications are swept. “To prove that the natives of Sicily had access to horses 1,000 years before what was traditionally raw with enormous repercussions and considerably modifies the existing models of domestication, use and eating practices.”
For historians, the discovery rewrites not only the calendar of domestication of horses in the Mediterranean, but it also offers a richer overview of ritual life, intercultural contact and economic strategies of the beginning of bronze.
Learn more: The old DNA illuminates the history of horses in the Americas
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