I’ve read many articles claiming that
Kazhakstan’s Akmola Province was the site of the earliest domestication of the horse by the Botai people/culture. I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” (1992)p. 268 " The first evidence of horse domestication is for the Sredny Stog culture around 4000 BC, in the stepped just north of the Black Sea…".Are there still competing theories for the first horse domestication or has the issue been settled?
I look forward to your feedback.
I wouldn’t say “settled”, but the latest evidence, does seem to support the Botai having domesticated them, and not just liking eating horses a whole lot, which was the standard objection. The corral geochemical analysisis particularly convincing.
Having said that - Diamond was going by the best available consensus at the time (and that book was published a quarter-century ago) - most of the published work I’ve found favouring the Botai hypothesis is post-2000 (e.g. the corral investiagtion is 2008), and the big investigation into horses specifically started in 1993.
The other thing is that the major evidence for horse domestication by the Sredny Stog culture was the cheek pieces from one burial, but that was shown to be a much later intrusion in 1997 (so, post-Third Chimpanzee)