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

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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.