Latest Domestication of the horse Stories
Brett Smith for RedOrbit.com Just two days after the Triple Crown, scientists have determined that domestic horses, like the Kentucky Derby winner “I’ll Have Another,” originated on the grassy plains of modern-day Ukraine, southwest Russia and western Kazakhstan. UK scientists at the University of Cambridge used a genetic database of more than 300 Eurasian horses to trace the origins of domestic breeds, according to their study published in the May 7 edition of the science journal...
An endangered species of horse -- known as Przewalski's horse -- is much more distantly related to the domestic horse than researchers had previously hypothesized, reports a team of investigators led by Kateryna Makova, a Penn State University associate professor of biology. The scientists tested the portion of the genome passed exclusively from mother to offspring -- the mitochondrial DNA -- of four Przewalski's horse lineages and compared the data to DNA from the domestic horse (Equus...
Saudi Arabian officials said archaeologists have begun excavating the site of a 9,000-year-old civilization, including horse fossils, suggesting people in the Arabian Peninsula domesticated horses in the ancient culture. HRH Prince Sultan bin Salman, president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA), submitted the discovery to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah. Salman said the discovery at the al-Maqar site challenges the popular notion that...
An international team of researchers has used ancient DNA to produce compelling evidence that the lack of genetic diversity in modern stallions is the result of the domestication process. The team, which was led by Professor Michi Hofreiter from the University of York, UK, has carried out the first study on Y chromosomal DNA sequences from extinct ancient wild horses and found an abundance of diversity. The results, which are published in Nature Communications, suggest the almost...
The earliest known domestic horses are around 4,600 years old. They were originated in the steppes between modern Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Using this evidence, two different hypotheses have been suggested: 1) domestic horses spread from this area over the rest of Eurasia; 2) horse domestication was a multiregional process, having occurred several times in different local places."Previous analysis on mitochondrial DNA from modern Iberian horses pointed to the D1 haplogroup as the most...
Sandra Olsen of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History describes how she and her colleagues, with support from NSF, discovered evidence of the early beginnings of horse domestication in KazakhstanPaleolithic hunters in Europe and Asia began exploiting horses for meat thousands of years ago, yet the origin of horse domestication long has eluded archaeologists--for some captivating reasons.One of the biggest reasons is that for many centuries, horse skeletons did not significantly differ in...
An international team of researchers has traced the lineage of the earliest known domestic horses to Kazakhstan. The findings, published in the journal Science, suggest horses were ridden by humans as early as 5,500 years ago, the National Science Foundation said Friday. Archaeologists say the research supports the hypothesis that the horses of Northern Kazakhstan contributed largely to the development of neighboring cultures. Having a domesticated animal that could be eaten, milked, ridden,...
Humans domesticated horses as early as 5,500 years ago, according to new findings from a team of archaeologists on Friday. The new estimate is about 1,000 years earlier than researchers has previously considered, and about 2,000 years earlier than domestic horses are known to have been in Europe.Researchers from Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pa., and the universities of Exeter and Bristol in the U.K., found signs of man's earliest attempts to domesticate horses occurred...
