Ancient genomes reveal the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski's horses

The earliest archaeological evidence for horse husbandry derives from the Eneolithic Botai culture of the steppes of Central Asia, ~ 5,500 ya, but the exact nature of early horse domestication remains controversial. We report 42 new ancient genomes of ancient horses (including 20 from Botai) compared with 46 published ancient and modern genomes. We reveal that Przewalski’s horses are the feral descendants of domestic horses first herded at Botai and not the last remaining truly wild horses on the planet. All domestic horses dated from ~4.000 ya to present only show ~2.7% of Botai-related ancestry. This indicates that a massive genomic turnover, coincident with large-scale population migrations of the Early Bronze Age “Yamnaya” pastoralists, underpin the expansion of the domestic horse stock that gave rise to modern domesticates.