Scientists have traced the ancestry of the modern horse to a lineage that emerged 4,200 years ago and quickly became dominant across Eurasia, new research shows.
The horse transformed human history – and now scientists have a clearer idea of when humans began to transform the horse. Around 4,200 years ago, one particular lineage of horse quickly became dominant across Eurasia, suggesting that’s when humans started to spread domesticated horses around the world, according to research published Thursday in the journal Nature.
In the past, you had many different lineages of horses,' said Pablo Librado, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and co-author of the new study. That genetic diversity was evident in ancient DNA samples the researchers analyzed from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating back to 50,000 years ago. But their analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes showed a notable change around 4,200 years ago.
Researchers believe the very earliest horse ancestors arose in North America, then sauntered across the Bering Strait into Asia around a million years ago. They flourished in Asia, but went extinct in the Americas. People had domesticated other animals several thousand years before horses — including dogs, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep. But the new research shows that the shrinking genetic diversity associated with domestication happened much faster in horses.
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