Scientists have found out when the steppe horsemen first appeared in Europe

A new study has found that archaeologists accidentally discovered the world’s first horsemen while studying skeletons found under 5,000-year-old mounds in Europe and Asia.

The ancient horsemen were part of a group of semi-nomadic people who swept across Europe and western Asia, bringing with them the precursor of the Indo-European language family. The findings support the hypothesis that the horse played an integral role in the expansion of this group and therefore in the spread of the Indo-European language.

The new analysis was based on 217 human skeletons from the Black Sea-Caspian steppe, a geographic area that stretches roughly from Bulgaria to Kazakhstan. For decades, researchers have debated when horses were domesticated. In Kazakhstan, 5,000-year-old horse skeletons show signs of tooth wear that could be caused by bridles. Horse pens have also been found.

In the same period, horse milk peptides were found in the dental plaque of Russian residents. It is important to note that the geographical explosion of this culture, which spread 4,500 kilometers in just one or two centuries, suggests that horses may have been used as transport animals.

So archaeologist Martin Trautmann from the University of Helsinki in Finland and his colleagues collected data on six diagnostic signs of the skeleton, which together were called “riding syndrome”. Because bone is a living tissue, it responds to loads that are applied to it. Constant riding can lead to spinal injury and degeneration, but it can also lead to more subtle changes in the bones of the legs and hips as the human body adapts to regular riding.

In skeletons from 39 sites across Eastern Europe, Trautmann and his colleagues found that two dozen had at least half the signs of riding syndrome.

However, they are most confident in identifying five representatives of this equestrian culture, originating from present-day Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, as likely riders.

“Our results provide a strong argument that horseback riding was already a common activity for some riders as early as 3000. [до н.э.]“, they wrote in their article.

The new discovery was described in an article published in the journal Scientific Advances.