Horses were being ridden, worked, and traded long before anyone thought it possible. New research pushes back the accepted timeline of human use of horses by centuries, showing that humans used horses in organized ways as early as the 4th millennium BCE, if not earlier. The research is published in the journal Science Advances.

Horses were being ridden, worked, and traded long before anyone thought it possible. New research pushes back the accepted timeline of human use of horses by centuries, showing that humans used horses in organized ways as early as the 4th millennium BCE, if not earlier. The research is published(open access) in the journal Science Advances.

Taming and domestication were not single events. They were a slow, stop-start process, full of setbacks, playing out over generations and across vast regions, before full domestication set in shortly before 2000 BCE.

“Horses were already being used in sophisticated, widespread ways before we could pin down full domestication. That gap reshapes how we understand human history,” says Professor Volker Heyd, co-lead author of the research.