[Wild horse or domesticated horse? Horse remains from the neolithic settlement in Pestenacker, Bavaria].

The bone finds from the neolithic settlement in Pestenacker (near Landsberg am Lech) date back to the second half of the 4th millennium BC (Altheim). Like in any other late neolithic horse bones, the question we have to deal with is whether they represent the remains of wild horse or early domestic horse, as we do not know for certain yet the date of the earliest domestic horses' occurrence in Middle Europe. The post pleistocene distribution of the wild horse is described. For a long time people thought that hardly any wild horses existed in post pleistocene Middle Europe any longer, due to the increasing amount of woodland. However, recent research has corrected this hypothesis. Three criteria-the horse bones' share in the total amount of bone finds, the pollen-analytic reconstruction of the former environment, and the size of the bones-serve to show that the bones most probably represent wild horses which at that time lived on the gravel terraces along the river Lech.