Horses at the cave of Pech Merle.
From the BBC:
Scientists have found evidence that leopard-spotted horses roamed Europe 25,000 years ago alongside humans.
Until now, studies had only recovered the DNA of black and brown coloured coats from fossil specimens.
New genetic evidence suggests “dappled” horses depicted in European cave art were inspired by real life, and are less symbolic than previously thought.
The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Horses, which were the most abundant large mammal roaming Eurasian 25,000 years ago, were a key component of early European diets.
So it is not surprising that the cave art of this time had a certain equestrian flare – horses make up 30% of the animals depicted in European cave paintings from this era.
Biologists, interested in the diversity of European animals before the last Ice Age, are interested in how accurately these early artistic impressions portrayed the colouring of the horses that lived alongside the ancient humans.
“It was critical to ensure that the horse depictions from the cave paintings were based on real-life experiences rather than products of the imagination,” explained lead author Arne Ludwig from The Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.
In previous work, Dr Ludwig, and his colleagues, recovered only the DNA of black and brown coat colours from the prehistoric horse bones.
But the dappled coats of the 25,000 year horses depicted at the Pech Merle cave complex in France convinced the team to take a second look.
***
By revisiting the fossil DNA of 31 horse specimens collected from across Europe, from Siberia to the Iberian Peninsula, the researchers found that six of the animals carried a mutation that causes modern horses to have white and black spots.
Of the remaining 25 specimens, 18 were brown coloured and six were black.
Dr Ludwig explained that all three of the horse colours – black, brown and spotted – depicted in the cave paintings have now been found to exist as real coat-colours in the ancient horse populations.
The researchers say that these three colours likely provided enough variation for humans to create the diversity of coat colours and patterns seen in modern horses.
The domestication of horses, which produced modern breeds, is thought to have begun about 4,600 years old in the steppe between modern Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
I’m trying to figure out if the color they found in these horses is the dapple-gray coloration or the leopard complex/Appaloosa color.
The leopard complex was already known to be an old mutation within the horse species, but it wasn’t thought to be this old.
I’m going to guess it’s the leopard pattern, since dapple grey horses eventually turn whitish in old age.
Yeah. They do.
And I’d say it’s leopard, because it’s very widespread. It’s always believed to have been ancient.
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Clearly these are MERLE horses.
From Pech Merle Cave.
Wow, that’s amazing! I love this… I have some strange fascination with cave paintings.
I have done thousands of hours of reading, online and hard copy, on horse color genetics–it’s been a favorite OCD hobby for decades. The greying gene and the LP/Patn “appy complex” are very different genes, and the article quote strongly leads me to think this is LP, not grey. A greying horse normally does not ever develop dark spots on a light or white background; they develop light spots on their base color or just get paler with every spring shed. “…a mutation that causes modern horses to have white and black spots” is strongly suggestive of either Appy-marked or tobiano, as overo & sabino pintos tend to appear to have white splashes on a darker ground color and all four genetically-caused pinto patterns I’m aware of (tobiano, overo, sabino, and splash) look exactly nothing like the cave paintings, separately or in combination.
It’s my understanding that the spot-blanketed, white-blanketed & varnish Appy patterns are believed to be caused by “helper” genes, like the Great Dane gene that wipes out the background color of a merle to produce the true harlequin thus far found in no other breed of which I’m aware. LP, small round colored spots on a white ground all over the body, appears to be the oldest pattern gene in the non-pinto spotting group, with “Patn” coming along later to restore most of the body color, leaving the classic “spotted blanket” pattern (which often shows dark, round spots in the base color as well as the blanket). Horses from the time the cave was painted might also have presented a nearly or fully white appearance, as the LP gene removes virtually all base color in its homozygous form. “Fewspot” leopards and “true snowcap” Appies produce 100% Appy traits in their offspring, surprising many a novice breeder when a bland white mare with a few dark hairs drops loudly-patterned babies no matter the pattern of the sire. It’s also interesting to note that while the greying gene does cause all forms of LP/Patn/etc spotting to white out with advancing age, it takes a lot longer for the spots to grey out than it does the base color, which is not the case with pinto horses.
what’s interesting to me is that the LP pattern is supposed to provide some negative heath issues for horses, yet it has persisted over all this time. One can accept keeping “odd colored” horses as domestic (humans always seem to like odd colored animals) but why did it persist in the wild? I’d really like to know at what point the stripes seen in zebras developed and if there is any connection between striping seen in zebras and spotting seen in horses (there is apparently a connection between striping and spotting in cats). Was the spotting originally a plus in some environments (as with striping)? That might explain it’s persistance despite some drawbacks. Also of interest is that (as with much of this research) a conclusion made a few years ago is falsified with new data. It’s one reason why I feel one should be cautious about some assertions regarding the relationship of some dog breeds and the evolution of dog breeds from initial wolves. Some of the conclusions are likely to prove based on too little data.
Oh, no.
We shouldn’t be cautious; we should be malleable. The thing to understand with science is usually every study has a limit, and new ones generate test those limits to see if the theory still hold true.
[…] I mentioned earlier, the leopard complex in horses existed when horses were wild animals. There were “Appaloosa” horses 25,000 years ago. People were hunting horses in those days. They weren’t selecting them to be tame at […]