"It's a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the equestrian journey to the Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses - around 3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought.

Archaeologists say the discovery may revise thinking about the development of some pre-agricultural Eurasian societies and put an earlier date to their dispersal into Europe and elsewhere. These migrations are believed to have been associated with horse domestication and the spread of Indo-European languages.

At the very least, on the first Saturday in May the winning thoroughbred should be toasted not with a julep but a taste of koumiss, the fermented mare's milk favored by equestrians in Central Asia. It's an acquired taste, so keep bourbon on hand just in case.

Evidence for the earlier date for equine domestication was set to be described Friday in the journal Science by an international team of archaeologists. The report's lead author is Alan Outram of the University of Exeter in England.

The archaeologists wrote of uncovering ample horse bones and artifacts from which they derived "three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication" of horses by the semisedentary Botai culture, which occupied sites in northern Kazakhstan for six centuries, beginning at about 3600 B.C.

The shape and size of the skeletons from four sites were analyzed and compared with bones of wild horses in the region from the same time, with domestic horses from the Bronze Age, centuries later, and with Mongolian domestic horses. The researchers said the Botai animals were "appreciably more slender" than robust wild horses and resembled domestic horses more closely.

Outram said in an interview that it was not clear from the research if the breeding of the tamed Botai horses had by then led to the origin of a genetically distinct new species. But their physical attributes were strikingly different, he added, and this made the animals more useful to the people as meat, milk sources and beasts of burden and locomotion.

The second pieces of evidence were the marks on the horses' teeth and damage to skeletal tissue in the mouths. The researchers said this represented the wear of mouthpieces - or bits - inserted for harnessing with a bridle or similar restraint to control working animals.

Other archaeologists, digging at other sites, have detected similar traces of what they said was bit wear, but this has been disputed as evidence of domestication. Outram said that some of the damage to the Botai teeth and jaw bones could only have been caused by bit wear." (International Herald Tribune)