Pastoralists Lost: Pioneer equine and ruminant herders of the Central Asian Steppes and their role in early horse husbandry

马的驯化激发了交通、通讯和战争形式的革命，不可逆转地改变了整个欧亚大陆的人类互动。令人惊讶的是，这种驯化过程在不同的时间独立出现在一个以上的地理区域。五千多年前，在今天哈萨克斯坦的草原上，博泰文化作为人类实验的热点，以畜牧业作为生产食物的手段。一千多年来，这些最早的牧民专门从事马的放牧，直到反刍动物被驯化到草原上，刺激了马、山羊和牛的融合，形成了一个有凝聚力的“草原牧民群体”。与此同时，在2500多公里外的庞堤-里海大草原上，一个完全不同的马系也开始受到人类的控制。由于具有骑马和拉战车的特点，这一血统最终产生了我们所有的现代驯养马，并迅速蔓延到欧亚大陆，取代了当地的马种群和伴随它们的游牧生活方式。牧民Lost调查了哈萨克斯坦北部和东部的早期畜牧业实验，这是草原上人类创新的熔炉，马最早是在这里被人类控制的。我们仔细研究了游牧生活方式的核心要素，但在早期马的驯化过程中却有着令人惊讶的未知的重要性：流动性，以及动物被移动以适应人和马的相互需求的方式。《迷失的牧人》还探讨了随着牛、绵羊和山羊的到来，马-牧民如何重新构建他们与马的关系，采用并创造了影响所有牲畜物种的新畜牧业实践的“诀窍”，以及如何应对从西方引进的新家马谱系的快速涌入。在此过程中，我们开创了一个新的理论范式，明确地强调了多中心和多样化的发展轨迹在驯化过程中的作用，过去动物使用系统的多样性促进了文化和生存弹性，并质疑目前嵌入我们对过去的更广泛理解中的“成功”和“失败”概念。《失落的牧民》采用了尖端的考古科学技术，包括先进的质谱分析、蛋白质组学和基因组分析，这些技术应用于从档案收藏和高度针对性的新挖掘中检索的骨骼、牙齿和陶瓷。这一独特的综合技术库将提供有关动物流动性和饮食、它们的扩散和基因组遗产以及它们如何根据生存需要或文化传统为人们提供食物的高分辨率、多尺度信息，同时支持向下一代哈萨克考古学家传授深入的知识。

The domestication of the horse inspired revolutions in transport, communications and forms of warfare that irrevocably transformed human interactions across the Eurasian continent. Surprisingly, this domestication process emerged independently in more than one geographical region at different timings. Over five thousand years ago, in the grasslands of modern-day Kazakhstan, the Botai Culture emerged as a hotspot of human experimentation with horse husbandry as means to produce food. These first pastoralists specialized exclusively in equine herding for over a thousand years, until dispersals of ruminant domesticates into the steppe stimulated the fusion of horses, caprines, and cattle into a cohesive 'steppe pastoralist package'. At the same time, over 2.500 km to the west in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a completely different lineage of horses were also coming under human control. Selected for traits that enhanced riding and chariot pulling, this lineage eventually gave rise to all our modern domestic horses and rapidly spread across Eurasia, replacing indigenous equine populations and the pastoralist lifeways that accompanied them. Pastoralists Lost investigates early experimentation with animal husbandry in northern and eastern Kazakhstan, a crucible of human innovation in the steppe where horses were first brought under human control. We intensively scrutinize key elements central to pastoralist lifeways but of surprisingly unknown importance in early horse domestication processes: mobility, and the ways in which animals were moved to mutually accommodate the needs of both people and horses. Pastoralists Lost also explores how equine-pastoralists restructured their human-horse relationships with the arrival of cattle, sheep and goats, adopted and created ‘know-how’ in the form of new husbandry practices that impacted all livestock species, and confronted the rapid influx of the new lineage of domestic horses introduced from the west. In doing so, we break ground on a new theoretical paradigm that explicitly foregrounds the role of polycentric and diverse developmental trajectories in the domestication process, a multiplicity of past animal-use systems that fostered cultural and subsistence resilience, and questions the concepts of "success" and "failure" that are currently embedded in our wider understanding of the past. Pastoralists Lost engages cutting-edge archaeological scientific techniques including advanced mass spectrometry, proteomic, and genomic analyses applied to bones, teeth, and ceramics retrieved from archived collections and highly targeted new excavations. This uniquely integrated arsenal of techniques will unlock high-resolution, multi-scalar information on animal mobility and diet, their dispersals and genomic legacies, and how they supplied people with food according to subsistence needs or cultural traditions, while supporting in-depth knowledge transfer to the next generation of Kazakh archaeologists.