Nukes, Space Travel, Genes, and Kazakhstan

In August, Kazakhstan commemorated two important events in the history of nuclear technology that took place within its borders. Those events are described below.

But these anniversaries seem as good an opportunity as I think I will ever have to share the following observation: the history of Kazakhstan is of surprising relevance to understanding our past, present, and future as a species.

First Lightning

“President Truman’s announcement that we have evidence of the occurrence of an ‘atomic explosion’ in the Soviet Union within recent weeks,” The New York Times wrote in September 1949, “ranks only next to his original announcement of the explosion of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. It marks the end of the first period of the atomic age and the beginning of the second.”

This “momentous event,” as the paper goes on to call it, was the Soviet Union’s first test of a nuclear weapon. The test, codenamed "First Lightning" by the Soviets, transformed the Soviet Union into a nuclear peer of the United States, setting the stage for decades of Cold War fears of a nuclear showdown between the superpowers.

The First Lightning test took place in the Central Asian Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan at a site known as the Semipalatinsk Test Site outside of Semey, Kazakhstan. (Semey was previously named Semipalatinsk.) The site is also known by its nickname, the Polygon. And First Lightning was just the beginning. During the Cold War, there were approximately 2,000 nuclear weapons tests, and an incredible 456 of those tests were conducted in Kazakhstan. The consequences have been predictably devastating for its people and environment.

So, Kazakhstan was the site of the first Soviet nuclear test and of approximately a quarter of all of the world’s nuclear tests.

But Kazakhstan was also the first nation to close a nuclear testing site, closing the Semipalatinsk site on August 29, 1991, the anniversary of the First Lightning test, shortly after Kazakhstan gained its independence from the Soviet Union. As an independent nation, Kazakhstan has sought to play a leading role in nuclear nonproliferation, handing over to Russia the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union and helping to establish the Central Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone.

Kazakhstan’s relevance to Cold War developments is not confined to the domain of nuclear testing, however.

Baikonur Cosmodrome

“MOSCOW: Flight Is Taken as Another Sign That Communism Is the Conquering Wave,” declared the New York Times on April 16, 1961.

The Soviet Union won another round last week in the psychological and propaganda war for men’s minds. As he orbited about earth last Wednesday, Major Yuri Gagarin was a soldier in that conflict which occupies the center of the world stage now that the great powers fear the consequences of hydrogen-bomb warfare.

Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet pilot, was the first person to travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. He did so on April 12, 1961 in a Vostok 3KA spacecraft, orbiting the Earth in about an hour and a half before ejecting at 6 or 7 kilometers above the Earth and parachuting back to the ground.

Gagarin was rather nonchalant about the experience. At a press conference following his return to Earth, Gagarin explained that “My state-of-being during the flight was superb. During the active portion, when the spaceship was injected into orbit, the effects of gravitation, vibration and noise, as well as other factors of the cosmic flight, did not have any bearing on my condition.” “My biggest wish,” he announced, “is to fly toward Venus, toward Mars, which is really flying.” A crater on the moon was later named in his honor.

Gagarin was killed in a plane crash in 1968. In 2013, declassified material revealed that a second plane had flown too close to Gagarin’s, sending his into an irrecoverable tailspin.

Gagarin’s trailblazing journey around the Earth had begun at Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first spacelaunch facility. The first successful artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome just three and a half years earlier. And the facility is still in operation today, increasingly launching American astronauts following NASA’s retirement of the space shuttle program.

When we think of Yuri Gagarin and Sputnik, we think of the Soviet Union, and when we think of the Soviet Union, we think of Russia. However, Baikonur Cosmodrome isn’t located in Russia. It’s located in southern Kazakhstan, and that makes Kazakhstan home to the world’s first and longest running spacelaunch facility in the world.

So, Kazakhstan has been deeply connected to twentieth-century events and developments of world-historical importance. But the Cold War was not the first time that events of global significance occurred in Kazakhstan. To discover one of the earliest moments of global significance to unfold within the territory now occupied by the nation of Kazakhstan we have to venture back millennia to meet the Botai hunter-gatherers.

The Botai Culture and the Domestication of the Horse

The Botai culture is an archaeological culture. In other words, we have no writing from the Botai culture, just material remains. Among the many things we cannot know about the Botai are what they called themselves—but they certainly didn’t call themselves the Botai. Archaeologists dub the cultures they discover after the sites at which they are discovered. Artifacts discovered near Botai, Kazakhstan become the material remains of “the Botai culture.”

The Botai culture occupied a site in the steppes, or grassland, of northern Kazakhstan between about 3400 and 2700 B.C. They were roughly contemporaneous with the Yamnaya archaeological culture to their west. However, unlike the Yamnaya, the Botai culture had no wheeled vehicles, no metal, and they did not have formal cemeteries. And yet, these people who possessed so little are of ongoing interest to archaeologists and are at the heart of one of the most hotly debated questions in all of archaeology.

And it all has to do with horses.

Millions of years ago, horses occupied the grasslands of large portions of the Old World and the New World. Evidently, they made quite an impression on Stone Age humans. There are more than 100 caves in Europe containing prehistoric artwork, primarily in France and Spain, and almost one third of the images of animals are of horses.

But as travel between Siberia and North America became cut off, the horses of the two hemispheres were separated from one another, and they would never reunite. That’s because the horse, which originally evolved in the Americas, went extinct there while the continents were separated. When the native peoples of the Americas next saw horses, Europeans were riding them.

In Jared Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), he argued that humans were the most likely cause of the extinction of the large mammals of the New World. “Hunters expanding southward through the Americas, encountering big animals that had never seen humans before, may have found those American animals easy to kill and may have exterminated them,” he wrote. Others point to climate change. But whatever the cause of the New World extinctions, all of the world’s surviving horses were now to be found in Eurasia, primarily on the vast Eurasian steppes.

Human populations on the steppes hunted wild horses. But when winters grew colder between 4200 and 3800 BC, humans decided to fundamentally alter their relationship to horses, and the consequences of that decision have rippled down throughout history.

Horses were far from the first animals domesticated by humans. But the animals that humans had domesticated by about 4000 BC were not well adapted to the harsher winters. Cows will go hungry rather than dig through snow in search of grass. Sheep are only modestly more self-reliant, willing to dig through a thin layer of snow. Horses, however, are different. In his 2007 book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College, writes that “Horses are supremely well adapted to the cold grasslands where they evolved.” Unwilling to passively starve, they will use their hooves to smash through snow and ice in search of grass and water. So, whereas cows and sheep require fodder in harsh winters, horses will continue to forage, making them an ideal animal to keep in the winter as a source of meat.

Specialists debate the details of early horse domestication. However, they agree on at least one thing: horse domestication took place somewhere on or around the Eurasian steppe between 4800 BC and 2500 BC.

What does this all have to do with Kazakhstan? Kazakhstan extends across a large stretch of the Central Eurasian steppes, and some of the earliest evidence of horse domestication is found in northern Kazakhstan—at Botai.

It would apparently be difficult to exaggerate the centrality of the horse to the Botai culture. 300,000 animal bones have been recovered from the Botai site, and a stunning 99.9% of them are horse bones. But the Botai culture were not farmers. Indeed, they seem to have created a culture unlike any other known to archaeology. According to David Anthony, “…Botai was a settlement of specialized hunters who rode horses to hunt horses, a peculiar kind of economy that existed only between 3700 and 3000 BCE, and only in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan.”

Anthony has argued that horseback riding began elsewhere and spread to Botai. Specifically, he has written that the Botai may have acquired the notion of horseback riding from the more technologically advanced Yamnaya to their west. However, genetic evidence has both challenged this interpretation as well as added an unexpected twist to the story of the human relationship to the horse.

The Genetic Revolution in Archaeology

The studies that have shed light on the people and horses of Botai are part of an ongoing revolution in the field of archaeology being wrought by genetic technology, a revolution that has been compared to the transformation brought about within the field by radiocarbon dating technology in the second half of the twentieth century. In a landmark accomplishment in 2010, scientists fully sequenced an ancient human genome for the first time, and they now possess genetic data on more than 1,300 ancient humans. Just this year, a study published in Nature analyzed the largest collection of ancient human DNA ever assembled, and the study is helping reshape our understanding of the prehistory of the Eurasian steppes. The significance of the study is also discussed here.

If the Botai culture was in close enough contact with the Yamnaya culture to have picked up the idea of horse husbandry from them, you might expect certain other types of exchanges to take place—namely, exchanges of genes. If researchers could show that the Botai and the Yamnaya exchanged DNA, we’d know that they were in contact, and we’d have reason to suspect that the Botai borrowed the idea of horse husbandry from their more sophisticated neighbors.

But the genetic evidence, also published in 2018, says just the opposite. The DNA from three individuals from Botai was analyzed, and none possessed indications that their parents had participated in amorous activities with the Yamnaya.

So, perhaps the Botai did indeed domesticate the horse on their own after all.

But what do the horses have to say about all this?

That’s actually the biggest surprise of all. But to understand it, we have to take a look at “the last truly wild horse.”

“The Last Truly Wild Horse”

“Another successful step in the exploration of Inner Asia…has at length been revealed to science,” begins Nikolai Przewalski in his 1879 travelogue From Kulja, Across the Tian Shan to Lob-Nor.

Przhewalski—pronounced shu-VUL-skee—was a Russian explorer of the 1870s and 1880s. His first adventure had been commissioned by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society to expand Russia’s knowledge of Central Asia. Describing the European state of knowledge of this part of the world, Przhewalski wrote, “…the whole of Eastern High Asia, from the mountains of Siberia on the north to the Himalyas (sic) on the south, and from the Pamir to China Proper, is as little explored as Central Africa or the interior of New Holland.”

One of Przhewalski's adventures began at a place we've already mentioned. “At Semipalatinsk we were joined by the companions of my last expedition to Mongolia…who declared their readiness to share with me once again the hardships and privations of a new journey.” Semipalatinsk, now Semey, had begun as a fort of the Russian empire in Kazakhstan in 1718. Relocated to its present site in 1778, it served as a junction for caravans traversing Central Asia. It was a natural launch point for one of Przhewlaski’s famous expeditions to the East. Of course, as Przhewalski and his companions assembled in the imperial hub, they could not have been aware that the name Semipalatinsk would one day be known to the world as one of the principal testing sites for the most destructive technology ever conceived by the species, and that some of the signature legacies of Russian imperial domination of Kazakhstan would one day be birth defects and radioactive lakes. Nuclear technology was more than half a century away—Przhewalski’s From Kulja hit the bookshelves in the same year that Thomas Edison conducted his famous New Year’s Eve demonstration of his incandescent lightbulb at Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Przhewalski spent years of his life exploring Central Asia and publishing his findings. But of all the flora and fauna that Przhewalski described in his travels, there is one with which his name is forever conjoined: the Przewalski’s horse.

During one his expeditions, Przhewalski was presented with the skull of a horse. He passed this skull on to a taxonomist, and it was apparently this taxonomist who dubbed it Przhewalski’s horse, the name by which it has been known in the West ever since. To the Mongolians, they are known as takhi, or spirits.

The Pzhewalski’s horses have a distinct appearance, with stout legs and no forelock. But what made Przhewalski’s horses truly unique was that they were apparently the only remaining wild horses in the world.

In the decades following Przhewalski’s travels in Central Asia, the numbers of Przhewalskis declined. Hunting, harsh winters, and human encroachment upon their habitats are typically offered as explanations. But Przhewalskis were also sought out as curiosities for zoo collections. They were eventually declared extinct in the wild, having last been observed in their natural habitat in 1969.

However, the Przhewalskis were about to become the subject of one of history’s most famous conservation efforts. In 1972, Jan and Inge Bouman of the Netherlands were honeymooning in Czechoslavakia. At Prague Zoo, they observed a dozen Przewalski’s horses living in poor conditions and resolved to return the horses to the wild. Their efforts helped lead to the establishment of the Naturepark in Rotterdam, a small reservation for Przhewalski’s horses. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the newly independent Mongolia viewed the reintroduction of the takhi to Mongolia as a fitting assertion of its independence and a celebration of its past. In 1992, takhi arrived in the newly created Hustai National Park in Mongolia. Today, there are 2,000 takhi in the world—endangered, but not extinct, in part because of the horse’s chance encounter with two Dutch honeymooners.

Anyone who is familiar with the Przhewalski’s horses knows at least one thing about them: they are the last wild horses. In an article on the PBS website in 2015 entitled “Saving the World’s Only True Wild Horses,” the author writes, “Man…has never broken the Przewalski’s horse. For thousands of years, this hardy species roamed the Central Asian steppes, bearing no riders and knowing no fences.” “You don’t ride the takhi…” reported Smithsonian Magazine in December 2016. The magazine continues: “The horse is too wild for that. While it has been captured and occasionally confined to zoos, it has never been tamed—it is the only truly wild horse in existence. Other horses that are thought of as wild are in fact feral.” Noting that the largest population of takhi in the world today are located within 60 miles of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, the article’s author wrote, “It seemed astonishing to me that such a wild thing lived so close to a city of 1.4 million people.”

The last truly wild horses—it’s an alluring notion, and authors can certainly be forgiven for becoming a bit effusive when discussing it. But that’s where the DNA evidence from the ancient Botai horses comes in.

Back to Botai

The team of researchers who analyzed the Botai horse DNA, among them Alan Outram of the University of Exeter, collected DNA from 20 of the horses. The first thing that their analysis revealed was that the Botai horses are not the ancestors of modern domesticated horses. In other words, somewhere on the Eurasian steppes, the ancestors of modern domesticated horses came under human control. But somewhere else on the steppes, in a separate instance, a different set of horses were also brought under human control. The latter are the horses at Botai, and it may be that the people at Botai were the ones who domesticated them.

But if the Botai culture had domesticated horses and those horses are not the ancestors of today’s domesticates, what happened to the descendants of the Botai horses?

The analysis of the Botai horse DNA answered that question as well, and the answer has abruptly undermined our romantic vision of the Przhewalski’s horse, the last of its kind, too wild to be tamed.

At some point following their rendezvous with the Botai culture, the Botai horses apparently made a break for it, returning to the wild. They spent the subsequent millennia doing what they had always done—galloping and grazing on the vast Eurasian steppes. Then, in the nineteenth century, a taxonomist, after analyzing a skull provided to him by a Russian explorer of Central Asia, recognized it to be a previously undescribed species and named it after the explorer that had “discovered” it: Equus ferus przewalskii, the Przhewalski’s horse. Unaware of our species' past association with these horses, we imagined them to be the last of their kind. But that 2018 study finally revealed the truth, residing in the horses’ DNA all along, like an undeciphered ancient script: the Przhewalski’s horses are the descendants of the Botai horses. The Przhewalski’s are not wild, but feral—animals once under human control but that returned to the wild. Far from the last wild horses, the Przhewalski’s horse may in fact be the descendants of the first domesticated horses.

And so, the first human to ride horses may have lived in Kazakhstan, pretty darn close to where a stunning proportion of the world’s nuclear tests took place, and not all that far from where we launched a man through the atmosphere for the first time.