Unsaddling old theory on origin of horses

Botai horses were tamed in Kazakhstan 5,500 years ago and thought to be the ancestors of today's domesticated horses. . . until a team led by researchers from the CNRS and Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier sequenced their genome. Their findings published on 22 February 2018 in Science are startling: these equids are the progenitors not of the modern domesticated horse, but rather of Przewalski's horses—previously presumed wild! The earliest proof of equine domestication points to the steppes of Central Asia roughly 5,500 years ago. Current models suggest that all modern domesticated horses living now descend from those first tamed in Botai, in the north of present-day Kazakhstan. For CNRS scientist Ludovic Orlando—from the Anthropologie Moléculaire et Imagerie de Synthèse research lab (CNRS / Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier / Paris Descartes University)—and his team, sequencing the genomes of 20 of these horses provided a snapshot of biological evolution associated with domestication.