around 30 000 years ago deep within a cave in  france ancient humans drew a series of animals in charcoal a group of elegant fearsome cave lions a  herd of woolly rhinos with giant horns some locked in battle a long-eared owl engraved in clay with  its head swiveled 180 degrees perched and watching and perhaps most striking of all a panel of  majestic horses in profile all painted by the same artist these are the oldest known paintings of  horses ever discovered the first of many that show up again and again in cave art from europe from  around thirty thousand to twelve thousand years ago in fact according to some estimates horses are  the most frequently represented animal in the art of this period back when those paintings were  made in france in the cave now known as chauvet horses would have been a source of food for people  as well as artistic inspiration but over time our relationship with horses would shift they would  become our companions and the literal workhorses behind the rise of many cultures and civilizations  but do these ancient artworks depict the same wild horses that we eventually domesticated and do our  modern horses descend from just one domesticated population or did it happen many times in  many places answering these questions has been tricky as we've needed to bring together  evidence from art archaeology and ancient dna because as it turns out the history of  humans and horses has been a pretty wild ride at its heart the story of horse domestication  has been so mysterious for so long because good evidence has been really hard to come  by for one thing the wild horses depicted in ancient artwork the potential ancestors of modern  horses no longer exist which might sound weird because there are plenty of horses that live in  wild herds across the world today but these are all descendants of domestic horses the subspecies  equus ferris cabalis that were released or escaped we call these feral horses as opposed to lineages  of horses that were never domesticated which we call wild horses and at the genetic level feral  horses are still indistinguishable from domestic horses the only potential wild horse that's still  around is an endangered subspecies javalsky's horse also known as the taki or mongolian wild  horse and i'm pronouncing it that way because that's how sir david attenborough pronounces  it and he gets the final word with me although also i have heard it called the p horse which for  what it's worth smithsonian calls it the p horse what was it talking about okay so today there  are only a few thousand of them spread across several populations in europe and asia and we're  still debating whether or not these horses were ever domesticated at any point in time by anyone  if not then they're the only living horses that could truly be described as wild they're the  last living insight into what the ancient wild horse populations of eurasia might have been like  and they bear a striking resemblance to the most ancient depictions of horses with their short  stocky necks and rigid bristly manes you gotta hand those ancient artists they just really  nailed it but javalsky's horses don't bridge the gap between those ancient artworks and our  modern horses because the genetics are pretty clear they're not the ancestors of modern domestic  horses they don't even have the same number of chromosomes so where did modern horses come from  well for a while we thought that they might trace back to a 5 500 year old settlement in kazakhstan  called bowtie and in one of our earlier episodes about horse evolution we even said i think  actually i was the one who said this that that place was the origin of modern domesticated horses  but the science has changed a lot since then starting in 1993 archaeologists began finding  a huge number of horse remains around bow tie and in 2009 they reported the discovery of  pottery that contained chemical residues from horse meat and milk fat they even found horse  teeth with wear patterns that suggested that the horses had been bridled and maybe even ridden  but then in 2018 the connection between bowties horses and our modern horses was challenged by  geneticists who took another look at the remains they concluded that the horses from bow tie had  little to no genetic connection with modern horses in fact they were indistinguishable  from zawalski's horses and then in 2021 researchers reevaluated the teeth and argued that  those wear patterns could have happened naturally they even found similar patterns on the teeth  of ancient wild horses that had never come into contact with humans they proposed that the people  of bow tie hadn't domesticated horses at all but instead we're just harvesting them from  the wild for food so we still don't know for sure when the first domestication of horses took  place or how many times it happened after all it might be that many different cultures domesticated  horses independently and just didn't leave behind any evidence either archaeological or genetic but  thanks to a huge study of ancient dna we finally have a good understanding of the domestication  event that really matters to us the one that gave rise to all of our modern horses in a paper  published in 2021 a team of over 160 researchers sequenced the genomes of 273 ancient horses from  across eurasia covering the last 50 000 years and they found that up until around 4 000  years ago eurasia had a diverse community of wild horses with a lot of genetically  distinct lineages spread across the region then pretty suddenly one lineage of forces just  exploded spreading rapidly across the continent and replacing other horses as it went this sudden  shift marked the rise of the domestic lineage that all of our modern horses descend from and the  researchers were able to pinpoint the origin of this lineage to the region of what's now russia  around the volga and don rivers there around 4 200 years ago people began domesticating  and breeding those horses in huge numbers okay but so what made these particular horses  the direct ancestors of our modern ones so successful well it seems that they had some key  genetic variants that breeders probably selected for one of the variants changed the function of  a gene called gsdmc which seems to be involved with the spine potentially giving these horses a  stronger back making them ideal for carrying the heavy weights of people chariots and goods another  one affected a gene called zfpm1 which is actually involved in the brain chemistry that affects mood  regulation possibly making the horses less anxious and skittish and more docile so they are easier  to handle and breed by around 3 500 years ago the modern domestic horse had spread far and wide  across eurasia and replaced the other populations of horses and today their descendants all over the  world come in many different shapes and sizes from small ponies to massive draft horses who can all  trace their homeland back to the grassy step of russia over 4 000 years ago without these horses  human history would probably be unrecognizable to us nearly everywhere they went they transformed  the way we traveled farmed and waged war almost overnight in evolutionary terms and  we still find horses just as fascinating and beautiful and mesmerizing as those ancient  artists in france did thirty thousand years ago