Comment by eesmith

I think you are reading "carriage" too specifically, when I suspect it's meant as a wider term for any horse-drawn wheeled vehicle.

Your [0] says "Chariot burials about 2500 BC present the most direct hard evidence of horses used as working animals. In ancient times chariot warfare was followed by the use of war horses as light and heavy cavalry.", just after "the most unequivocal early archaeological evidence of equines put to working use was of horses being driven."

That suggests the evidence is stronger for cart use before riding.

If you follow your [1] link to "bullock cart" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullock_cart you'll see: "The first indications of the use of a wagon (cart tracks, incisions, model wheels) are dated to around 4400 BC[citation needed]. The oldest wooden wheels usable for transport were found in southern Russia and dated to 3325 ± 125 BC.[1]"

That is older than 3000 BC.

I tried but failed to find something more definite. I did learn from "Wheeled Vehicles and Their Development in Ancient Egypt – Technical Innovations and Their (Non-) Acceptance in Pharaonic Times" (2021) that:

> The earliest depiction of a rider on horseback in Egypt belongs to the reign of Thutmose III.80 Therefore, in ancient Egypt the horse is attested for pulling chariots81 before it was used as a riding animal, which is only rarely shown throughout Pharaonic times.

I also found "The prehistoric origins of the domestic horse and horseback riding" (2023) referring to this as the "cart before the horse" vs. "horse before the cart" debate, with the position that there's "strong support for the “horse before the cart” view by finding diagnostic traits associated with habitual horseback riding in human skeletons that considerably pre-date the earliest wheeled vehicles pulled by horses." https://journals.openedition.org/bmsap/11881

On the other hand, "Tracing horseback riding and transport in the human skeleton" (2024) points out "the methodological hurdles and analytical risks of using this approach in the absence of valid comparative datasets", and also mentions how "the expansion of biomolecular tools over the past two decades has undercut many of the core assumptions of the kurgan hypothesis and has destabilized consensus belief in the Botai model." https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.ado9774

Quite a fascinating topic. It's no wonder that Wikipedia can't give a definite answer!