Horse Fact

Horses have lived on Earth for more than 50 million years, according the American Museum of Natural History. According to Scientific American, the first horses originated in North America and then spread to Asia and Europe. The horses left in North America became extinct about 10,000 years ago and were re-introduced by colonizing Europeans.

It is believed that horses were first domesticated in Asia between 3000 and 4000 B.C., according to Oklahoma State University. Back then, horses were used mostly for milk and meat. Eventually, horses joined oxen as a form of animal transportation.  

Origin of horse domestication

Archaeological evidence indicates that the domestication of horses had taken place approximately 6,000 years ago in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Despite intensive study over a long period of time, many questions remain about the early development of the species as it underwent domestication. One crucial question involves whether domestication was limited to a single location or occurred in multiple areas. Tied to this question of origins is whether domesticated horses spread throughout Eurasia or whether the practice of horse domestication spread to new areas, with local breeders capturing their own wild horses and introducing them to the domestic horse gene pool. Modern genetic techniques have been used to answer these questions, but different regions of the horse genome (that is, the complete nucleic acid sequence of a horse’s genetic code) have yielded different answers. .