Earliest domestication of horse?
Via Dienekes, The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking:
Horse domestication revolutionized transport, communications, and warfare in prehistory, yet the identification of early domestication processes has been problematic. Here, we present three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 B.C.E. Metrical analysis of horse metacarpals shows that Botai horses resemble Bronze Age domestic horses rather than Paleolithic wild horses from the same region. Pathological characteristics indicate that some Botai horses were bridled, perhaps ridden. Organic residue analysis, using 13C and D values of fatty acids, reveals processing of mare’s milk and carcass products in ceramics, indicating a developed domestic economy encompassing secondary products.
Related: The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World and lactase persistence.
These dudes are talking on Science Friday in 90 minutes.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/
Old news in part?
http://www.acagle.net/ArchaeoBlog/?p=5723
To your readers who own that (dense) book, this would fall under chapter 10. The Botai hypothesis is in it, pp. 216-220. But that is late in the chapter.
For background, chapter 4 had already made clear that the wheel was invented 3500 BCE. (p. 66) Chapters 5-7 are mostly methodological but we do get a regional definition of “eneolithic”; by 3500 BCE, they had arsenic bronze in Europe, but this was still a copper age in Botai. (p 125) Chapters 8-9 deal with developments from 6500-4500 BCE.
So, chapter 10: it first explains that horses may have been herded centuries earlier – fenced up, like cattle, for food. The impetus for this was a cold spell 4200-3800 BCE. (p 200)
The chapter then looks into harnessing and riding; to that, it first debunks a size-variance method which (he says) had dated this to 2500 BCE. (p 203) That year is in any case incompatible with the Indo-European vocabulary which, by then, had accumulated many technical terms dealing with chariotry. (p 64)
The book thinks that people were riding horses before 4000 BCE. (pp 221, 223) That is based on a stallion with weathered teeth dug up in Armenia. (p 221) This is the part your article addresses.
If they ate horses, I suppose it would be a case of horses for courses?
And Oliver would have said “Can I have some mare, please Sir?”