It is still a mystery where, when and who tamed the first horse, but what is steadily being unraveled by scientists is because more and more evidence reveals the expansion of the species along with human companions.
In this adapted excerpt from “Horse: 4,000 Years of Genetic Journeys around the World (Princeton University Press, 2025), author Ludovic Orlando, director of the centre of personification and the genomics of Toulouse, explores the genetic relationship between the modern cold adopted Yakutian horse and the modern cold aakutian horse between ancient specimens pulled from the “gate.”
More than 370 miles (600 km) north of Yaktsk, Batagya is home to a rather impressive crater. The crater known as the “gateway to hell” is the result of the impact on local climates initiated by our own activities. The results of deforestation of Taiga forests in the 1960s today are sufficient to begin the formation of depression that is more than 320 feet deep (100 meters) and more than about 0.6 miles (1 km) long, growing larger each year.
Locals also call the crater the “gateway to the Underworld.” Because as erosion, its aspects collapse, revealing the corpses of past animals. One of these recipients appeared in the headline in May 2018. It is a two-month foal that has remained frozen for over 42,000 years and is later called Lena’s horse.
In the close-ups of the animal’s head, especially the nose, the details of the hair seemed very alive, so you might have thought they were still breathing.
I had no chance to tackle that 42,000-year-old corpse, but I had access to another carcass that came from the intestines of the bait. The DNA was so completely conserved that there was no real problem in generating high-quality genomic sequences. The animals were male as they carried X and Y chromosomes.
Radiocarbon dating said that five or two hundred years ago he lived almost simultaneously with the Botai horse. Maybe they crossed the road with them. However, on a genetic level, they did not share much with them or DOM2, a modern family horse lineage.
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Instead, the animal genomes have descended directly into the lineage from Equus lenensis, the famous Lena horse that disappeared today. It represents the end of that species that our genome sequenced – but that doesn’t mean it was the end of the survivors.
Adapting to these latitude glacial colds for thousands of years, Lena’s horses could have continued to walk through Siberian permafrost for thousands of years after specimens from the Battagai last closed their eyes.
Local legends say that the horses we found in Yaktia today are descendants of the wild horse population that was tamed on the site for a very long time.
To solve the problem, we had to arrange the genomes of the horses that live there today in turn. Luckily, Andreitikonov, a colleague at the Russian Academy of Sciences, was able to seriously complicate the logistics of the area’s scientific expedition before winter took over.
Yakutian horses are not kept in captivity. They are left in the Semi-Freedoms of the Taiga and Tundra, where they wander before gathering once a year.
The Yakutian horses are small and stocky, with long, thick coats. It also has the ability to accumulate fat in record time in a short two months when plants can grow. There is also another exceptional asset. During the winter, winter metabolism can be slowed down without hibernating.
It took me several months for the package that Tykonov had sent to reach me, so during that time I was able to get archaeological specimens from the 19th century. They came from the digs carried out in the area for almost 15 years by Eric Cruvesey of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, and consisted of animal ruins placed as sacrificial offerings on human tombs.
The analysis of the genome was critical and put an end to legend. The specimens analyzed had much in common with the specimens of the Batta Grey. They all looked like full-fledged members of the lineage of DOM2, a modern family horse that had returned to the western Russian steppes four or two hundred years ago.
Instead, genetic information agreed to a book on history that stems from a relatively recent origin to Yakuts and their horses.
Most sources agree that horse-riding people occupying the latitudes south of Lake Baikal began their migration to the north in the 13th century. They would have laid the ethnic foundations of the modern Yakut people and the cultural foundations of what Carol Ferret calls the “clique of horses.”
In Yaktia, horses are not just national heroes flying over the flag of the Saka Republic. It is not only vehicles essential to vast areas that appear to have no obvious geographical boundaries. In Yaktia, there are far more horses. They eat meat and drink milk. They recycle the skin to make the skin, and the tendons make the rope. It is celebrated as the subject of a story and song. Animals are an integral part of the local lifestyle.
But if the Yaktian horse did not come off the Batagai horse, was it possible that it still carried some of its genes?
The idea wasn’t that slick. Nearly 2% of the genome of people living in Eurasia today descend from Neanderthals who are mixed with their ancestors.
If Lena’s horse had not yet died in the 13th century, would it have been mixed with the modern tame horse that the first Yaktian riders brought with them? Was it possible that these animals inherited resistance to the extreme climate of the region from horses they encountered from horses that lived tens of thousands of years ago on the same territory?
Our analysis rebutted that scenario. As in the 19th century, the genetic texts carried by modern Yaktian horses are not rich in the aspects that are characteristic of the texts carried by Lena’s horses. We don’t really find it in them any more than other modern tame horses in the world, today, or in the past.
Modern Yaktian horses have been biologically adapted to the genetics of other ancestors since the 13th century.
Then we might think that Lena’s horse was probably already gone. Even if our data confirm that only the number of modern domesticated horses reached the latitude of the Yaktia and established the current population, it is still true that natural selection has done its job and collectively carried a pool of genetic variation that creates animal biology according to environmental demands.
Thanks to the fact that Yakutia horses fit very well into their environment, genetic changes involve genes with very diverse biological effects, moving from hair and its density to fat stockings, including regulation of the biological clock that shows sugar metabolism and day and night length to cells.
At that time, evolution appears to have not provided the Yaktia horse with a superjane that gave a single unique superpower, but that evolution proceeded in the species through coordinated coordination of a highly diverse set of features.
The irony of history is that in this genetic diversity we have found several genes that have also contributed to the formation of biology of other species that deal with the same Siberian environment, such as wool mammoths and our own species. Thousands of miles from the Tibetan plateau, we have once again come from nose to nose with this familiar phenomenon: evolutionary convergence.
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