Direct 14C dating of equine products preserved in archaeological pottery vessels from Botai and Bestamak, Kazakhstan.

Direct and accurate radiocarbon dating of lipid residues preserved in ceramics is a recently established method that allows direct dating of specific food products and their inception in human subsistence strategies. The method targets individual fatty acids originating from animal fats such as ruminant dairy, ruminant adipose, non-ruminant adipose and aquatic fats. Horse lipid residues found in Central Asian pottery vessels are also directly dateable using this new method. Here we present the identification of equine lipid residues preserved in two pottery assemblages from the Neolithic and Eneolithic in Kazakhstan and their direct 14C dating. The site of Botai, previously radiocarbon-dated to the 4th millennium BC, was used as a reference to evaluate the dates obtained directly on horse lipids. The direct dating of equine products extracted from Botai potsherds are shown to be compatible with previous 14C dates at the site. The site of Bestamak, lacking previous14C measurements, had been relatively dated to the Neolithic based on pottery typologies. The direct dating of equine residues made it possible to anchor the pottery assemblage of Bestamak in the 6th millennium BC confirming their Neolithic attribution. These findings demonstrate the potential for dating horse products through a compound-specific approach, while highlighting challenges in 14C dating individual fatty acids from lipid extracts in which their abundances differ substantially. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12520-022-01630-2.

Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski's horses.

The Eneolithic Botai culture of the Central Asian steppes provides the earliest archaeological evidence for horse husbandry, ~5500 years ago, but the exact nature of early horse domestication remains controversial. We generated 42 ancient-horse genomes, including 20 from Botai. Compared to 46 published ancient- and modern-horse genomes, our data indicate that Przewalski's horses are the feral descendants of horses herded at Botai and not truly wild horses. All domestic horses dated from ~4000 years ago to present only show ~2.7% of Botai-related ancestry. This indicates that a massive genomic turnover underpins the expansion of the horse stock that gave rise to modern domesticates, which coincides with large-scale human population expansions during the Early Bronze Age.