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Part HI Reading Comprehension (40% )
Section B (10%)
Passage 1
People were riding horses much earlier than previously thought, new archaeological finds suggest. Scientists have now traced the first conclusive evidence of domesticated horses back to Kazakhstan, about 5,500 years ago. That’s 1,000 years earlier than we already knew about,and about 2,000 years before domesticated horses showed up in Europe. 66 Scientists analyzed the horses,lower leg bones,and found that they more closely resembled those of later known domestic horses rather than those of ancient wild horses. The researchers also developed a new method to identify the chemical signatures of fat from horse milk,and were able to find these traces on Botai pottery fragments. 67“The invention of a method to identify the fat residues left by horse milk in ceramic pots is a spectacular and brilliant advance,” archaeologists David Anthony and Dorcas Brown o£ Hartwick College wrote in an e-mail. “If you’re milking horses, they are not wild. ”68 For one thing, it meant people could travel much farther, and much more quickly, than
before.
“ When people began to ride, it revolutionized human transport,” Anthony and Brown said.
“We still measure the power of our transportation technologies in horsepower, because for millennia,until just about 150 years ago, that was the fastest transport humans had.”69 They were less nomadic than previous residents of that area, which is why archaeologists have an easier time studying their remains, compared to earlier peoples who moved around so often that they didn’t leave large deposits in any one place. 70“We’ll probably be looking more widely now trying to apply the same techniques to other sites,”Brown said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we find even earlier ones. I think even if there are earlier sites, they’re still going to be in the neighboring area, where those big grass plains are.
A. The advent of horsemanship was a major advance for civilization,right up there with inventing the wheel and making tools out of iron.
B. Finally, a few of the ancient horse skulls bore physical markings on the teeth that could have been made by the use of a harness with a bit in the mouth.
C. Experts suspect that some of these even earlier groups may have also domesticated houses, though.
D. Comparisons were also made to leg bones from modem and 3,000-year-old domesticated horses and from wild Siberian horses that lived more than 20,000 years ago.
E. The Botai people lived in planned-out villages, with horses partly buried underground.
F. Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of horse bones at the site of the ancient Botai culture in Kazakhstan.