Early Bronze Age people in Syria crossed donkeys with wild asses to make prized horse-like hybrids, demonstrating advanced understanding of animal breeding
The bones of horse-like creatures unearthed in a 4500-year-old royal tomb in Syria are the earliest known hybrid animals bred by people, with DNA sequencing showing them to be crosses of donkeys and Syrian wild asses.
They discovered that the animals were hybrids of the domestic donkey and the Syrian wild ass. This cross went extinct last century, but it was possible to sequence its DNA using 19th-century teeth and hair specimens housed in an Austrian zoo and a 11,000-year-old bone dug up in Turkey. Geigl believes that people in the region may have started crossing donkeys with Syrian wild asses after spotting them mating by chance and producing offspring with desirable qualities.
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