5,000-Year-old Burial Mounds of the World’s Earliest Horseback Riders Found in Asia and Europe

Researchers discovered human skeletons in 4,500-5,000-year-old burial mounds in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Serbia, with six pieces of evidence of being horse riders.

The ancient riders belonged to the Yamnaya civilization, a group of semi-nomadic people that swept through Europe and western Asia, carrying the forerunner to the Indo-European language family. As per Live Science, the use of horses was a critical moment in human history, signaling the growth of this group and spreading the Indo-European language.

World's Earliest Horseback Riders

The new study, titled "First Bioanthropological Evidence for Yamnaya Horsemanship," published in Science Advances, included 217 human remains from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, which stretches approximately from Bulgaria to Kazakhstan. Researchers have been debating when horses became domesticated for decades.

In Kazakhstan, 5,000-year-old horse skulls exhibit wear on their teeth from bridles, while others have discovered putative gated enclosures. Horse milk peptides were discovered in the dental plaque of Russians over the same time period.

Crucially, the Yamnaya culture's geographical expansion of about 3,000 miles (4,500 kilometers) in a century or two shows horses may have aided as transportation animals. However, there is no direct evidence that the Yamnayacommunity domesticated horses.

Martin Trautmann, an archaeologist at the University of Helinski in Finland, and his colleagues gathered data on six diagnostic skeletal traits known as "horsemanship syndrome," which is a response to the stresses on bone tissues caused by consistent horseback riding.

Trautmann and colleagues discovered that two dozen bones from 39 locations in Eastern Europe shared at least half of the horsemanship syndrome symptoms. However, they are most certain that five Yamnaya culture individuals from what is now Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary are probable equestrians.

Researchers wrote in their report that the data they gathered gave a compelling indication that horseback riding was a popular practice for some members of the Yamnaya culture as early as 3000 B.C.

Six Indicators of Horsemanship Syndrome

Cosmos reported six indicators of horsemanship syndromes that help identify horseback riders. These are the following signs:

Muscle attachment sites on the femur or thigh bone and pelvis.
Changes in the round shape of the hip sockets.
Pressure on the femur left an imprint.
Diameter and form of the femur shaft.
The repeated vertical impact caused vertebral degeneration.
Physical signs associated with bites, falls and kicks from horses.

Among the 156 people tested, at least 24 were classed as "potential riders." Meanwhile, five Yamnaya, two later, and two maybe earlier individuals qualify as "highly probable riders." Trautmann said that the high incidence of horsemanship syndrome in human skeletons indicates that these people rode regularly.

Implications of Yamnaya Culture Migrating Through Horseback Riding

It is difficult to estimate the ratio of men to women in ancient populations, Science reports. But if their findings are confirmed, one interpretation is that the Yamnaya men were warriors who surged into Europe on horses or drove horse-drawn wagons; horses had only recently been tamed in the steppe, and the wheel had only recently been invented.

Rasmus Nielsen, a population geneticist from the University of California, Berkeley, who was not a part of the study, said that the Yamnaya group might have been more concentrated on fighting, with quicker spread due to technical advances.

But aside from warfare, researchers believe that Yamnaya men appeared more attractive to females then compared to European farmers because they had horses and advanced technologies, like copper hammers. Conversely, the discovery that Yamnaya males traveled for several generations shows that not everything was perfect back home on the steppe.