The horses that galloped the Earth just 1,000 years ago probably looked very different from their modern descendants, researchers said on Thursday after compiling the most complete genetic history of any non-human species.
However, the biggest surprise of the vast study, which involved an international team of 121 scientists and was published in the journal Cell, was the staggering loss of genetic diversity in the past 200 to 300 years that accompanied modern breeding practices.
The horse was one of the last animals that was domesticated by humans, long after dogs, cattle and pigs, but about 5,500 years ago, people began to ride, milk and lock horses in pens.
“The horse has had a profound effect on human history,” said Ludovic Orlando, a research director with CNRS and the University of Toulouse, who coordinated the study.
Thanks to the horse, “we were able to go faster, further and to conquer new territories. We went to war differently. We were able to plough fields and do agriculture,” he said. “The horse of Alexander the Great was so remarkable that we know his name, Bucephalus.”
However, scientists still do not know the answer to a key question: What was the ancestor of the domestic horse?
To this end, the team analyzed the genomes of 278 specimens — mostly horses but also donkeys and mules discovered inadvertently — mostly from the past 5,000 years, across Europe and Asia.
Ancient genetics research saw a major technological leap in 2010 that allowed the team, working in a Toulouse laboratory, to extract and analyze DNA from bones that was not accessible before.
Today, there remain but two lineages: the domestic horse and Przewalski’s horse, also called the Mongolian wild horse.
They most likely originated in Central Asia, but this is only a hypothesis: to date, no genetic ancestor has been found.
Scientists have said that they are struck by the speed with which the genetic diversity of horses collapsed in the past two to three centuries, after remaining constant for the previous 4,000 years of domestication.
“What we picture as a horse today and what we picture as a horse from 1,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago was likely actually very different,” Orlando said.
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