What made the horses ripable

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WHumans in the pool began to take care of the plains and mountains on the elegant back of horses, this changed the course of history. The first final evidence of Equerisism dates 4,000 years ago: in the mountains of the Urals of Russia, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of bridles and tanks. But some scholars say that humans have started to count on horses to transport a few millennia earlier than that, in the Eurasian steppes near the Black Sea.

Whatever the moment when this human horse link appeared for the first time, it quickly favored the sharing of culture, language and trade between people from distant land and processed agriculture and war.

Now, a team of researchers from France, China and Switzerland claims to have identified the specific genes of horse lines that may have allowed humans to start taming and mounting these muscular animals. The genes they identified began to appear about 5,000 years ago and are involved in the temperament, the movement and the way in which the horse bodies are shaped. The researchers published their results in the journal Science.

Understanding the evolution of horses helps us to understand ourselves.

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“These genetic changes have enabled horses to become ridable and fast, which transformed human societies by accelerating transport, war and cultural exchanges,” explains the main author Xuexue Liu, a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. “In short, the genetics of horses and human social development have co-evolved in a process of mutually reinforcement.”

Liu and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of ancient horses collected on archaeological sites, Monitoring the way 266 genetic markers associated with traits changed during the period when humans raised them. A pair of genes known as GSDMC And ZFPM1 Also appear in other animals, such as mice, who helped researchers isolate and observe the effects of genes. GSDMC is linked to vertebral anatomy, motor coordination and resistance in mice, they found, while ZFPM1 is associated with anxiety and learning.

Understanding the evolution of horses helps us to understand, said William Taylor, an archaeozoologist from the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved in the study.

“I think this study very clearly shows that the domestication of horses was twinned and probably motivated by a desire to transport horses,” wrote Taylor in an email. “The first horse breeders raised horses with only a few things in mind, namely their behavior – damaged, aggression – and their movements / roles in transport.”

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Selective pressures of characteristics such as the heights of horses appear later in their genetic file, which suggests to Taylor that previous people did not happen for specific mantle dyes or other important traits for contemporary cyclists.

“These discoveries suggest that the transport of early horses – in the process of strongly noting the tank teams – was probably very different from that of the mounted driving that we know today, with different values and a different logistics,” said Taylor.

Taylor also stressed that the study results suggest that humans had little relations with horses before 3,000 BC and that in these first years, humans used them almost exclusively for transport. “It is exciting and tells us a very different understanding of the domestication of horses that the status quo.”

From a related perspective, also in ScienceLaurent Frantz, who studies zooarchaeology and evolutionary genomic at the University of Oxford, stressed the impressive importance for the history of the very first horsemen – and these tiny identified DNA bits.

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“Although the precise circumstances and the cultural identity of the persons responsible for this early and intensive breeding remain a mystery, they must have had the ingenuity, the technology and the foresight,” writes Frantz. “What is certain is that these first runners launched a revolution that changed the world, demonstrating how the immense currents of history can turn to the smallest biological changes.”