Botai culture

The Botai culture is an archaeological culture (c. 3700–3100 BC) of prehistoric northern Central Asia. It was named after the settlement of Botai in today's northern Kazakhstan. The Botai culture has two other large sites: Krasnyi Yar, and Vasilkovka.

The Botai site is on the Iman-Burluk River, a tributary of the Ishim River. The site has at least 153 pithouses. The settlement was partly destroyed by river erosion which is still occurring, and by management of the wooded area.

Archaeology

The population of the Botai culture were connected to the earliest evidence for horse husbandry. The settlements of the Botai which consisted of pit-houses were relatively large and permanent. Enormous amounts of horse bones were found in and around the Botai settlements, suggesting that the Botai people kept horses or even domesticated them. Archaeological data suggests that the Botai were sedentary pastoralists and also domesticated dogs.

Some researchers state that horses were domesticated locally by the Botai. It was once thought that most of the horses in evidence were probably the wild species, ''Equus ferus'', hunted with bows, arrows, and spears. However, evidence reported in 2009 for pottery containing mare's milk and of horse bones with telltale signs of being bred after domestication have demonstrated a much stronger case for the Botai culture as a major user of domestic horses by about 3,500 BC, close to 1,000 years earlier than the previous scientific consensus. Botai horses were primarily ancestors of Przewalski's horses, and contributed 2.7% ancestry to modern domestic horses. Thus, modern horses may have been domesticated in other centers of origin.

The pottery of the culture had simple shapes, most examples being gray in color and unglazed. The decorations are geometric, including hatched triangles and rhombi as well as step motifs. Punctates and circles were also used as decorative motifs.

Current research is being conducted by Alan Outram of Exeter University in association with other institutes, the Bristol (UK), Winchester (UK), and Kokshetau (Kazakhstan) universities, and the Carnegie Museum. Along with students, Outram conducted a magnetometer survey of the Botai site in 2008, and is looking into conducting further research into the Botai culture's role into the development of horse domestication.

Language reconstruction

Asko Parpola suggests that the language of the Botai culture cannot be conclusively identified with any known language or language family. He suggests that the Proto-Ugric word ''*lox'' for "horse" is a borrowing from the language of the Botai culture. However, Vladimir Napolskikh believes that it comes from Proto-Tocharian ''*l(ə)wa'' ("prey; livestock").

Václav Blažek suggests that the Botai people probably spoke a form of Yeniseian languages. Linguistic data lends some support for a homeland of Yeniseian within the Central Asian Steppe, prior to its migration into Siberia. This Yeniseian/Botai language contributed some loanwords related to horsemanship and pastoralism, such as the word for horse (Yeniseian ''*ʔɨʔχ-kuʔs'' "stallion" and Indo-European ''*H₁ek̂wos'' "domesticated horse") itself, towards proto-Indo-European.

Archaeogenetics

Damgaard et al. (2018) and Jeong et al. (2019) extracted aDNA from five different Botai individuals. Four of them turned out to be male, and another one was female. Two of the samples were taken from crania curated in Petropavlovsk Museum, denoted as "Botai Excavation 14, 1983" and "Botai excavation 15".

Autosomally, the Botai population turned out to derived most of their ancestry from a deeply European-related population known as Ancient North Eurasians (short ANE), while also displaying some "Ancient East Asian" (AEA) admixture. A model by Damgaard et al. suggests that the Botai people diverged from the ancestors of the Yamnaya culture about 15,000 years ago, while the admixture event between ANE-related ancestry and AEA-related ancestry was estimated to about 7,000 years ago. The Botai samples could be modeled as approximately ≈75% ANE (West-Eurasian) and ≈25% AEA (East Asian). The East Asian component is most enriched in modern-day Nganasans and Yakuts, and seems to have been introduced into the region through geneflow from Eastern Siberia.

Botai 14, dated to 3517-3108 cal BC, carried a derived allele at R1b1a1-M478, that occurs almost exclusively among Indo-European derived populations surrounding the Altai region. Botai 15, dated to 3343-3026 cal BC, belonged to a branch of the haplogroup N-M231 (N2a-P189.2* according to YFull). Regarding mitochondrial DNA, the Copper Age Botai sample BOT2016 belonged to the haplogroup Z1a, Botai 15 - to R1b1, and Botai 14 - to K1b2.

Two more Botai individuals were tested in September 2015. One sample belonged to the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup K1b2 and the paternal Haplogroup O-M268 (with the 97.1% probability).

Footnote

References

External links

*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Botai Culture
Archaeological cultures of Central Asia
Archaeological cultures of Northern Asia
Archaeology of Kazakhstan
Archaeology of Siberia
4th-millennium BC establishments