# The Domestication of the Horse: answers and explanations

Testmigo Practice Test 5, Listening Part 4

Source: Written by Testmigo.

## Answer key

| Q | Answer | Proof |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 31 | bit | damage of the sort associated with a bit |
| 32 | milk | but also mare's milk |
| 33 | dung | layers of horse dung have turned up at Botai sites |
| 34 | feral | They're feral, descended from herds that people had once managed |
| 35 | wear | more likely caused by natural wear |
| 36 | native | it had replaced the native horses almost everywhere in Eurasia |
| 37 | riding | the team argues that riding came first |
| 38 | languages | the Indo-Iranian languages all travelled together |
| 39 | back | a strong marker in humans for chronic back pain |
| 40 | docile | animals that were more docile and coped better with stress |

## Why these answers are right

**31. bit.** In the second piece of Botai evidence, some teeth had damage of the sort associated with a bit, which the lecturer describes as the part of a bridle that sits in the animal's mouth. The summary's device placed in a horse's mouth paraphrases that definition.

**32. milk.** The third clue came from the pottery: traces of fat inside the pots showed people had processed meat, but also mare's milk. Cooking vessels paraphrases pots, and the summary already gives meat, so the gap after the needs milk.

**33. dung.** The lecturer adds that layers of horse dung have turned up at Botai sites, which suggests the animals were kept in corrals. Deposits left by horses paraphrases layers of horse dung, and confined in enclosures paraphrases kept in corrals, so dung is the substance the deposits are made of.

The why and the trap for questions 34 onwards are free with an account on the [answers page](https://testmigo.com/ielts/listening/the-domestication-of-the-horse/answers).

## Transcript

**Announcer:** Part 4. You will hear a lecture about how and where the horse was first domesticated.

**Announcer:** First, you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40.

**Announcer:** Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.

**Lecturer:** Good morning, everyone. Today I want to turn to an animal whose history has turned out to be surprisingly messy: the horse.

**Lecturer:** Taming the horse changed how people travelled, traded and fought. Yet for a long time, nobody could say where it actually happened.

**Lecturer:** For years, the leading candidate was a culture known as Botai, on the grasslands of northern Kazakhstan. That's B, O, T, A, I.

**Lecturer:** Its settlements go back about five and a half thousand years, to roughly 3500 BC, and most of the animal bones thrown away there came from horses.

**Lecturer:** Now, a heap of bones only tells you that people ate horses.

**Lecturer:** What put Botai on the map was a 2009 paper setting out three kinds of evidence.

**Lecturer:** First, measurements of the leg bones showed they were closer to those of later, Bronze Age domestic horses than to wild horses from the same region.

**Lecturer:** The second was in the teeth. A few of the horses had damage of the sort associated with a bit, the part of a bridle that sits in the animal's mouth, which suggests they were controlled and, possibly, ridden.

**Lecturer:** And the third came from the pottery. Chemical traces of fat inside the pots showed people had processed meat, but also mare's milk.

**Lecturer:** On top of that, layers of horse dung have turned up at Botai sites, which suggests the animals were being kept in corrals.

**Lecturer:** Taken together, that persuaded most specialists that Botai was where it all began.

**Lecturer:** But in 2018 a team sequenced the genomes of ancient horses, twenty of them from Botai, and the result was a genuine shock.

**Lecturer:** The Botai horses were not, in fact, the ancestors of today's domestic horses. Domestic horses from about four thousand years ago onwards carry only around two point seven per cent Botai-related ancestry.

**Lecturer:** Instead, the Botai animals turned out to be the ancestors of Przewalski's horse, which had long been regarded as a truly wild animal.

**Lecturer:** The team's conclusion was that Przewalski's horses aren't wild after all. They're feral, descended from herds that people had once managed, and that later slipped out of human control.

**Lecturer:** Not everyone accepts that, mind you. In 2021 two researchers argued that the damage to the teeth was more likely caused by natural wear, and that Botai may simply have been a place where wild horses were hunted on a large scale.

**Lecturer:** So the search had to start again. A much larger study, published in Nature in 2021 by Pablo Librado and his colleagues, analysed two hundred and seventy-three ancient horse genomes from across Eurasia.

**Lecturer:** Their answer was the western Eurasian steppe, and in particular the region around the lower Volga and Don rivers, in what is now south-western Russia.

**Lecturer:** Horses living there were the ancestors of modern domestic horses. And from about 2200 BC, roughly four thousand two hundred years ago, breeders seem to have produced them in large numbers, to meet growing demand for travel on horseback.

**Lecturer:** What happened next was remarkably fast. By about 2000 BC, or between 2200 and 2000 BC to be precise, the lineage had reached Anatolia, the lower Danube and Central Asia, and by around 1500 to 1000 BC it had replaced the native horses almost everywhere in Eurasia.

**Lecturer:** Now, you might assume chariots were the reason. Chariots with spoked wheels do appear at about this time, in a culture called Sintashta, east of the Ural Mountains.

**Lecturer:** But the domestic lineage shows up in some places before there's any sign of chariots there, so the team argues that riding came first, and chariots added to the spread later on.

**Lecturer:** In Asia, it seems the horses, the chariots and the Indo-Iranian languages all travelled together.

**Lecturer:** One more surprise. Horses had often been linked with the westward migration of Yamnaya herders into Europe around 3000 BC, and with the spread of Indo-European languages. But horses of the Corded Ware culture, whose people descended partly from those migrants, show almost none of this ancestry, so the study rejects that link.

**Lecturer:** So why did this lineage succeed?

**Lecturer:** The team found strong selection at two genes. One, called GSDMC, is a strong marker in humans for chronic back pain, and also for a spinal condition that makes walking painful.

**Lecturer:** So the suggestion is that breeders were favouring horses with fewer back problems, which matters if an animal has to carry a rider.

**Lecturer:** The other gene, ZFPM1, plays a part in regulating mood, and when it's inactivated in mice, they become anxious. That points to selection for animals that were more docile and coped better with stress.

**Lecturer:** Bear in mind these are inferences from DNA, not observations of behaviour. But a horse that's easy to handle, with a sound back, is just what you'd want for a long journey. Right, next week: the donkey.

**Announcer:** That is the end of Part 4. You now have 30 seconds to check your answers.

[Practice The Domestication of the Horse](https://testmigo.com/ielts/listening/the-domestication-of-the-horse)