Botai culture

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Prehistoric cultures of Russia
Mesolithic
Kunda culture 7400-6000 BC Chr.
Neolithic
Bug Dniester culture 6500-5000 BC Chr.
Dnepr-Don culture 5000-4000 BC Chr.
Sredny Stog culture 4500-3500 BC Chr.
Ekaterininka culture 4300-3700 BC Chr.
Fatyanovo culture around 2500 BC Chr.
Copper Age
North Caspian culture
Spa culture 5000-3000 BC Chr.
Samara culture around 5000 BC Chr.
Chwalynsk culture 5000-4500 BC Chr.
Botai culture 3700-3100 BC Chr.
Yamnaya culture 3600-2300 BC Chr.
Afanassjewo culture 3500-2500 BC Chr.
Usatovo culture 3300-3200 BC Chr.
Glaskovo culture 3200-2400 BC Chr.
Bronze age
Poltavka culture 2700-2100 BC Chr.
Potapovka culture 2500-2000 BC Chr.
Catacomb tomb culture 2500-2000 BC Chr.
Abashevo culture 2500-1800 BC Chr.
Sintashta culture 2100-1800 BC Chr.
Okunew culture around 2000 BC Chr.
Samus culture around 2000 BC Chr.
Andronovo culture 2000-1200 BC Chr.
Susgun culture around 1700 BC Chr.
Srubna culture 1600-1200 BC Chr.
Colchis culture 1700-600 BC Chr.
Begasy Dandybai culture around 1300 BC Chr.
Karassuk culture around 1200 BC Chr.
Ust-mil culture around 1200–500 BC Chr.
Koban culture 1200-400 BC Chr.
Irmen culture 1200-400 BC Chr.
Late corporate culture around 1000 BC Chr.
Plate burial culture around 1300–300 BC Chr.
Aldy Bel culture 900-700 BC Chr.
Iron age
Baitowo culture
Tagar culture 900-300 BC Chr.
Nosilowo group 900-600 BC Chr.
Ananino culture 800-300 BC Chr.
Tasmola culture 700-300 BC Chr.
Gorokhovo culture 600-200 BC Chr.
Sagly bashi culture 500-300 BC Chr.
Jessik Beschsatyr culture 500-300 BC Chr.
Pazyryk level 500-300 BC Chr.
Sargat culture 500 BC Chr. – 400 AD
Kulaika culture 400 BC Chr. – 400 AD
Tes level 300 BC Chr. – 100 AD
Shurmak culture 200 BC Chr. – 200 AD
Tashtyk culture 100–600 AD
Chernyakhov culture AD 200–500

The Botai culture is a Copper Age ( Eeneolithic ) culture of the 4th millennium BC. In northern Kazakhstan . The eponymous site is near the village of Botai, not far from the capital Nur-Sultan (until 2019 Astana) . The Botai culture was best known because the earliest evidence of the domestication of the horse was discovered here around 5500 years ago.

Research history

Archaeologists from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History , Pittsburg, USA, and scientists from the University of Exeter , Great Britain, have been researching the Botai culture intensively for several years.

Way of life

In the Eeolithic period, a steppe economy-cultural type emerged, which has been preserved for thousands of years with some variations. The habitat of the horse breeders included steppes , forest steppes, thresholds and valleys. The survival of the population mostly depended on the organization of economic activity with the annual cycles. Settlements like Botai were used for wintering. In spring, the majority of the population set off towards the south-west, to the sandy soils, which were cleared of the thawing water early and thus guaranteed early vegetation. The bearers of this culture lived in large settlements with pit houses. The settlements were 150–200 km apart, as each settlement needed a suitable habitat to control its own herd. In the spring they built temporary dwellings, hunted and made winter purchases. The economy was based mainly on horse breeding , but also hunting and fishing . Bone, wood and stone processing are documented.

Material culture

The ceramic was mostly decorated with the geometric stitch pattern as well as the comb and string ornament. On the basis of a stylized representation on a fragment of a vessel, Zaibert suspects that the bearers of the Botai culture used the spoke wheel as early as the late Neolithic .

language

The representatives of the scriptless Botai culture are indirectly associated with the Indo-Europeans by some researchers in the wake of horse domestication , and others are assigned to the bearers of the Proto-Turkic language . There is no convincing evidence for either of these assumptions. Asko Parpola suspects that the language of the Botai culture cannot be identified with any known language or language family. He suggests that based on Hungarian ló , Mansi Lu and Khanty law reconstructed Ugric word * lox for "horse", whose origin is unknown and no horses word from a known Eurasian language family is similar to a loan word from the language of Botai culture is.

References

The Botai settlement

Reconstruction of a pit house of the Botai culture with a vestibule and main house

The settlement of Botai (approx. 3700-3100 BC) was discovered in 1980 by the Kazakh archaeologist Wiktor Saibert and has been systematically investigated since then. Its significance lies in the oldest archaeological evidence of horse domestication to date. The Botai settlement is approximately 15 hectares and is located on a flat area on the right bank of the Imanbulak River . The traces of pit houses are clearly visible on the surface. The archaeological excavations have so far opened up over 10,000 m², uncovered around 100 residential buildings, discovered around 300,000 artifacts and several hundred thousand animal bones. 99.9% of the bones come from horses.

Horse domestication

At that time, millions of horses lived here. In order to hunt them down and later keep them together, it was necessary to ride horses. This fact explains a certain morphological difference between the wild and the domesticated individuals. The research results of the American scientist David W. Anthony show that ten percent of all examined teeth of the Botai horses show signs of wear from bones and hair strands . The discovery of pens in 2006 confirms the presumption that the horse was domesticated in Botai. Direct evidence of horse taming is provided in 2009 by the remains of kumys (fermented mare's milk) in pottery shards, which are around 5600 years old.

Before these findings, the Sredny Stog culture in Ukraine was considered the oldest evidence of horse breeding. The evidence comes from the settlement of Deriyivka (4th millennium BC). However, an accelerator mass spectrometry determination of the bones of a stallion with snaffle wear on the teeth dates back to the Scythian Iron Age.

The journal Science reported in 2018 that the Przewalski horses are de-domesticated Botai horses that were feral about 5000 years ago. In addition, the genome of the Eurasian horses from the past 4000 years did not match the Botai horses. It is believed by researchers that a different group of horses from the 3rd millennium onwards are the ancestors of today's horses. The search for these ancestors is concentrated in areas in Central Asia , in the west of the Eurasian Steppe ( Pontokaspis ) and in Anatolia .

literature

  • В. Ф. Зайберт: Историко-культурное значение поселения Ботай. Археологиялык зерттеулер жайлы есеп. Алматы 2005, ISBN 9965-9575-2-0 , pp. 161-165.
  • В. Ф. Зайберт: Энеолит Урало-Иртышского междуречья. Петропавловск 1993, ISBN 5-7691-0263-2 .
  • С. С. Калиева, В. Н. Логвин: Скотоводы Тургая в третьем тысячелетии до нашей эры. Кустанай 1997, ISBN 9965-415-02-1 .
  • S. Bökönyi: horse domestication, domestic animal husbandry and nutrition. Budapest 1993, ISBN 963-7391-65-7 .
  • D. Brown, D. Anthony: Bit wear, Horseback Riding and the Botai Site in Kazakhstan. In: Journal of archaeological Science. 25, 1998, pp. 331-347.
  • M. Levine: Exploring the criteria for early horse domestication. In: Martin Jones (Ed.): Traces of ancestry: studies in honor of Colin Renfrew. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge 2004.
  • MA Levine: The exploration of horses at Botai, Kazakhstan. In: C. Renfrew, K. Boyle (Eds.): Prehistoric Steppe Adaptation and the Horse. McDonald Institute Monographs, Cambridge 2003, pp. 83-104.
  • M. Levine: Botai and the origins of horse domestication. In: Journal of Anthropological Archeology. 18, 1999, pp. 29-78.
  • S. Olsen: This old thing? Copper Age fashion comes to life. In: Archeology. 61, 2008, pp. 46-47.
  • V. Schnirelman, S. Olsen, P. Rice: Hooves across the Steppes. The Kazakh life style. In: S. Olsen (Ed.): Horses through time. Lanham, Maryland 2003, ISBN 1-57098-382-8 , pp. 129-152.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The dates in the table are taken from the individual articles and do not always have to be reliable. Cultures in areas of other former Soviet republics were included.
  2. ↑ 3700-3100 BC cal., Robert N. Spengler III, Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age. Journal of World Prehistory 28/3, (Sept. 2015), 240. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24766194
  3. ^ A b Alan K. Outram, NA Stear, R. Bendrey, Sandra Olsen, A. Kasparov, V. Zaibert, N. Thorpe, Richard P. Evershed: The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking. In: Science . Volume 323, No. 5919, 2009, pp. 1332-1335, doi: 10.1126 / science.1168594 .
  4. ↑ Charleen Gaunitz et al .: Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski's horses. In: Science. Online publication from February 22, 2018, eaao3297, doi: 10.1126 / science.aao3297 .
  5. ↑ a b c Зайберт 2005, 161–163
  6. ↑ a b Карл Молдахметович Байпаков: Археология Казахстана. Ȯнэр 2006, ISBN 9965-768-45-5 , p. 40.
  7. ↑ see also Ural Etymology Database
  8. ↑ Asko Parpola: The problem of Samoyed origins in the light of archeology: On the formation and dispersal of East Uralic (Proto-Ugro-Samoyed) . In: Tiina Hyytiäinen, Lotta Jalava, Janne Saarikivi, Erika Sandman (eds.): Per Urales ad Orientem. Iter polyphonicum multilingue. Festskrift tillägnad Juha Janhunen på hans sextioårsdag the 12 february 2012 (=  Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 264 ). Finnish-Ugric Society , Helsinki 2012, ISBN 978-952-5667-33-2 , p. 295 f . ( sgr.fi [PDF; accessed on January 25, 2015]).
  9. ^ Robert N. Spengler III, Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age. Journal of World Prehistory 28/3, (Sept. 2015), 240. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24766194
  10. ^ Sandra L. Olsen, Early Horse Domestication on the Eurasian Steppe. In: Melinda A. Zeder, Daniel G. Bradley, Eve Emshwiller, Bruce D. Smith (Eds.), New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms, Documenting Domestication . University of California Press 2006, 257. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnvs1.2 ., There as Kokshetau
  11. ^ Sandra L. Olsen, Early Horse Domestication on the Eurasian Steppe. In: Melinda A. Zeder, Daniel G. Bradley, Eve Emshwiller, Bruce D. Smith (Eds.), New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms, Documenting Domestication . University of California Press 2006, 257. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnvs1.2 .
  12. ^ Robert N. Spengler III, Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age. Journal of World Prehistory 28/3, (Sept. 2015), 240. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24766194
  13. ^ Robert N. Spengler III, Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age. Journal of World Prehistory 28/3, (Sept. 2015), 240. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24766194
  14. ^ Sandra L. Olsen, Early Horse Domestication on the Eurasian Steppe. In: Melinda A. Zeder, Daniel G. Bradley, Eve Emshwiller, Bruce D. Smith (Eds.), New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms, Documenting Domestication . University of California Press 2006, 257. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnvs1.2 .
  15. ^ Hélène Martin, Dominique Armand: The horse: Domestication. In: Steppe Warriors. Riding nomads of the 7th – 14th centuries Century from Mongolia. Primus Verlag, LVR-Landesmuseum Bonn, 2012, p. 88 f. Abstract:
    • "The sites suggested as the cradle of horse keeping are in areas such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan and are between 5000 and 6000 years old. An example is the settlement of Botai in Kazakhstan, which dates to around 3700-3100 BC and in which the oldest evidence for the domestication of the horse was found. "
  16. ↑ Прорыв в прошлое
  17. ↑ Революция скребков  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.neonomad.kz  
  18. ^ David W. Anthony: Bridling horse power. 2003, pp. 72-75.
  19. ^ Botai and horse domestication
  20. ↑ Dereivka (Ukraine) ; David W. Anthony, Dorcas R. Brown, The origins of horseback riding. Antiquity 65, 1991, pp. 22-38.
  21. ↑ csr / dpa: Przewalski horse but not a wild horse. February 23, 2018, accessed February 23, 2018 .
  22. ↑ Gaunitz, C .; Fages, A .; Hanghøj, K .; Albrechtsen, A .; Khan, N .; Schubert, M .; Seguin-Orlando, A .; Owens, IJ; Felkel, S .; Bignon-Lau, O .; de Barros Damgaard, P .; Mittnik, A .; Mohaseb, AF; Davoudi, H .; Alquraishi, S .; Alfarhan, AH; Al-Rasheid, KAS; Crubézy, E .; Benecke, N .; Olsen, S .; Brown, D .; Anthony, D .; Massy, ​​K .; Pitulko, V .; Kasparov, A .; Brem, G .; Hofreiter, M .; Mukhtarova, G .; Baimukhanov, N .; Lõugas, L .; Onar, V .; Stockhammer, PW; Krause, J .; Boldgiv, B .; Undrakhbold, S .; Erdenebaatar, D .; Lepetz, S .; Mashkour, M .; Ludwig, A .; Wallner, B .; Merz, V .; Merz, I .; Zaibert, V .; Willerslev, E .; Librado, P .; Outram, AK; Orlando, L .: Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski's horses . In: Science . Online, February 22, 2018, doi : 10.1126 / science.aao3297 .