Botai culture

The Botai culture is an archaeological culture (c. 3700–3100 BC) of prehistoric northern Central Asia. It was named after the settlement of Botai in today's northern Kazakhstan. The Botai culture has two other large sites: Krasnyi Yar, and Vasilkovka. The Botai site is on the Imanburlyq, a tributary of the Ishim. The site has at least 153 pit-houses. The settlement was partly destroyed by river erosion, which is still occurring, and by management of the wooded area. The Botai culture emerged with the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a variety of game to a sedentary lifestyle with a diet that heavily relied on horse meat. The settlements of the Botai consisted of pit-houses and were relatively large and permanent, the largest being the type site at Botai with over 160 houses. The population of the Botai culture has been connected to the earliest evidence for horse husbandry. Enormous amounts of horse bones were found in and around the Botai settlements, suggesting that the Botai people kept horses or even domesticated them. Archaeological data suggests that the Botai were sedentary pastoralists and also domesticated dogs. A number of researchers state that horses were domesticated locally by the Botai. It was once thought that most of the horses in evidence were probably the wild species, Equus ferus, hunted with bows, arrows, and spears. However, evidence reported in 2009 for pottery containing mare's milk and of horse bones with telltale signs of being bred after domestication have demonstrated a much stronger case for the Botai culture as a major user of domestic horses by about 3,500 BC, close to 1,000 years earlier than the previous scientific consensus. Botai horses were primarily ancestors of Przewalski's horses, and contributed 2.7% ancestry to modern domestic horses. Thus, modern horses may have been domesticated in other centers of origin. However, more recent studies analyzing dental calculus suggest an absence of dairy product consumption among Botai culture individuals, which would potentially discard the previously believed milking of the horses assumed from the presence of animal fats on pottery.