Were there domestic horses in ancient India?

Remnant bones of horses in Harappan sites, if they exist, could hold an answer

A recent report in Nature by Ludovic Orlando and his group from the Paul Sabatier University in Toulose, France (P. Librado et al., Nature 598, 636-642; 2021) has been able to collect bones and teeth samples of over 2,000 such ancient specimens from regions from where domestic horses could have originated, namely in the Iberian Peninsula in the southwestern corner of Europe, or the western-most edge of Eurasia (Spain and its neighbours), Anatolia (which is modern Turkey), and the steppes of Western Eurasia and Central Asia. As Tosin Thompson writes in his commentary in Nature of October 28, 2021, Dr. Orlando’s team analysed the complete genome sequences of about 270 samples from these regions, and also gathered information from archeology. In addition, they also dated radioactive Carbon 14, which decays at a fixed rate, to determine the age of these horse samples. These collective data have led them to decide that until about 4200 BCE, many distinct horse populations inhabited various regions of Eurasia.

A similar genetic analysis has also found that horses with the modern domestic DNA profile lived in the Western Eurasian Steppes, particularly the Volga-Don River region.