the-BA : 5000 Year Old Horse Milk

By Claire Witham

Archaeological evidence of horse milking in Kazakhstan proves that domestic horses were being used as early as 3500-3100 BC, announced Professor Richard Evershed at the BA Festival of Science on Wednesday.

This date is over 1000 years older than the previous earliest-known site at Ak Alakha in Siberia.

The finding was made by analysing potsherds from the archaeological site at Botai in Kazakhstan. Professor Evershed and Natalie Stear at the University of Bristol have been using chemical analysis techniques on tiny pieces of pottery to determine the presence of animal fatty-acids and distinguish the residues of meat and milk.

The horse was very important prehistorically as a source of food and milk and also as a means of transport and hunting. Excavations at the Botai site have discovered over 10 tonnes of bones, 99 per cent of which belong to horses.

Ritual horse burials and bone artefacts have also been found, but there had been previously no direct evidence of horse domestication.

"Clearly they were consuming horse," said Evershed, "but the question is whether they were wild or domesticated."

If the Bristol team could find evidence of horse milk in pottery then this would prove the presence of domesticated horses.

Determining the seasonality of the horse residues in the potsherds was the key to solving whether the horses were being kept and managed. A domesticated mare would only have been milked in the summer following the birth of foals in the spring.

To find the season signal they looked at the amount of deuterium in the fatty acids. Water is enriched in deuterium in the summer so an enriched signal in the potsherds would show that the product must have come from milk, as the signal from the water is rapidly passed to the milk.

Horse meat would not show this enrichment as it would have an averaged signal from the water drunk by the horse throughout its life, both the summer and the winter.

Enriched levels were found in two of the potsherds tested.

"Our research seems to provide the most conclusive evidence so far that at least some of the horses at the site were domesticated and used for milk," said Natalie Stear.

"It shows domestic horses far earlier than we already knew them to exist."

Analysis of further potsherds is being done to help unravel the role of the horse at Botai.

Read more coverage on the story at BBC News.