World’s 1st horse riders saddled up 5,000 years ago, ancient bones reveal

(STUDY FINDS) – The world’s first horse riders saddled up 5,000 years ago, a new study reveals. Researchers in Finland say equestrianism originated in a remote area of the Western Eurasian steppe. The evidence comes from remains in burial mounds called kurgans. The human skeletons displayed “evidence of horsemanship.”

They belonged to primitive sheep farmers from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a vast area between the Black and Caspian seas.

“Horseback-riding seems to have evolved not long after the presumed domestication of horses in the western Eurasian steppes during the fourth millennium BCE. It was already rather common in members of the Yamnaya culture between 3000 and 2500 BCE,” says Volker Heyd, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki and a member of the international team making the discovery, in a media release…