Free Republic

A Basenji is a dog breed indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa. Humans might have first domesticated dogs from wolves in Africa, with Egypt being one possibility, since wolves are native to that region. Modern humans originated in Africa, and now it looks like man's best friend first emerged there too. An extensive genetic study on the ancestry of African village dogs points to a Eurasian — possibly North African — origin for the domestication of dogs. Prior research concluded that dogs likely originated in East Asia. However, this latest study, the most thorough investigation ever on the ancestry of African village...

Examples of zebra-horse hybrids abound, but few are as stunningly eye-catching as ‘Eclyse’ pictured here.[1,2] While most other zorses have stripes across their entire body, Eclyse looks like she’s had her face and rear flank painted by a very clever artist. But the markings are real, and she’s become a major attraction at a safari park in the German town of Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock. Her mother, Eclipse, had spent a short time at a ranch in Italy, where she shared a paddock with other horses, as well as a zebra called Ulysses. On her return to Germany, Eclipse surprised her keepers...

Horses were first tamed at least 5,500 years ago, by peoples who not only rode them but milked them as well. Archaeological research has shown that the domestication of horses began at least 1,000 years earlier than thought, among the Botai culture that thrived in what is now Kazakhstan between 3700BC and 3100BC. A British-led team of scientists has discovered three lines of evidence that point to an equestrian tradition among the Botai, who lived in a region where wild horses are known to have been abundant. The findings, published in the journal Science, also show that the animals were...

The invention of agriculture was a pivotal event in human history, but archaeologists studying its origins may have made a simple error in dating the domestication of animals like sheep and goats. The signal of the process, they believed, was the first appearance in the archaeological record of smaller boned animals. But in fact this reflects just a switch to culling females, which are smaller than males, concludes Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution. Using a different criterion, that of when herds first show signs of human management, Dr. Zeder finds that goats and sheep were first domesticated...

Humans were processing cattle milk in pottery vessels more than two thousand years earlier than previously thought... In work published online in Nature this week, Professor Richard Evershed and colleagues describe how the analysis of more than 2,200 pottery vessels from southeastern Europe, Anatolia and the Levant extends the early history of milk by two millennia to the seventh millennium BC... Organic residues preserved in the pottery suggest that even before 6,500 BC milk was processed and stored, although this varied regionally depending on the farming techniques used. Cattle, sheep and goats were familiar domesticated animals by the eighth millennium...

The exact date when the Greeks used the Trojan horse to raze the city of Troy has been pinpointed for the first time using an eclipse mentioned in the stories of Homer, it was claimed today. # The truth about an epic tale of love, war and greed Scientists have calculated that the horse was used in 1188 BC, ten years before Homer in his Odyssey describes the return of a warrior to his wife on the day the "sun is blotted out of the sky". The legend of the fall of Troy is mentioned in Virgil and Homer's poems...

Heated debate over who planted first sunflower 22:00 28 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Colin Barras Could raking over the ashes of past civilisations help tackle the current food crisis? David Lentz at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, thinks so. Genetic information from wild strains of domestic crops could help to improve crop yield, he says, making it important to identify the point of domestication. That makes his controversial theory that the sunflower was domesticated in Mexico at least 4000 years ago more than just a matter of ancient history. "If we are to improve the sunflower crop, we need...

Domestication Of The Donkey May Have Taken A Long TimeAn international group of researchers has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought. (Credit: iStockphoto/Andrea Laurita) ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2008) — An international group of researchers has found evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and the early phases of donkey domestication, suggesting the process of domestication may have been slower and less linear than previously thought. Based on a study of 10 donkey...

How wild asses became donkeys of the pharaohs 21:00 10 March 2008 NewScientist.com news service Andy Coghlan The ancient Egyptian state was built on the backs of tamed wild asses. Ten skeletons excavated from burial sites of the first Egyptian kings are the best evidence yet that modern-day donkeys emerged through domestication of African wild asses. The 5000-year-old bones also provide the earliest indications that asses were used for transport. The skeletons suggest that the smaller frames of today's donkeys hadn't yet evolved. Instead, the bones resemble those of modern-day Nubian and Somali wild asses, which are much larger than...

A team of US archaeologists has discovered the ruins of a city dating back to the period of the first farmers 7,000 years ago in Egypt's Fayyum oasis, the supreme council of antiquities said. "An electro-magnetic survey revealed the existence in the Karanis region of a network of walls and roads similar to those constructed during the Greco-Roman period," the council's chief Zahi Hawwas said. The remnants of the city are "still buried beneath the sand and the details of this discovery will be revealed in due course," Mr Hawwas said. "The artefacts consist of the remains of walls and...

China To Start Excavation Of Horse-And-Chariot Burial www.chinaview.cn 2007-11-29 10:09:14 JINGZHOU, Hubei Province, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists will soon start excavations at the horse-and-chariot chamber of a tomb dating back 2,300 to 2,400 years, more than 100 years older than the tomb containing the terracotta army. "Excavation will start on the 131-meter-long horse-chariot sector of the Xiongjiazhong Tomb before February, 2008," said Yan Pin, director of the Archaeology Bureau of Jingzhou, central China's Hubei Province, where the tomb is. The tomb is the largest and best preserved yet found in China from the State of Chu in the...

Contact: Dolores Piperno pipernod@si.edu 202-633-1912 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Smithsonian scientists connect climate change, origins of agriculture in Mexico Cores from Laguna Tuxpan in Mexico's Iguala Valley, provided evidence for maize and squash cultivation along its edges by ~8000 B.P. and for the major dry event between 1800 and... New charcoal and plant microfossil evidence from Mexico’s Central Balsas valley links a pivotal cultural shift, crop domestication in the New World, to local and regional environmental history. Agriculture in the Balsas valley originated and diversified during the warm, wet, postglacial period following the much cooler and drier climate in the...

A Worldwide Push To Bring back chariot Racing THE WALL STREET JOURNAL May 24, 2007 SAO SIMAO, Brazil – On a drowsy May day in the country, tractors and combines were lumbering down dirt roads when, suddenly, a cloud of dust rose up on the horizon. Birds scattered. Rumbling across the green landscape came seven racing chariots, each pulled by four horses. Riding in the chariot decorated with an engraving of Alexander the Great was Luiz Augusto Alves de Oliveira, a 50-year-old sugar-cane farmer who has an epic plan: returning chariot racing to its ancient glory. In this May Day...

Drifters could explain sweet-potato travel An unsteered ship may have delivered crop to Polynesia.Brendan Borrell Where did these come from? How did the South American sweet potato wind up in Polynesia? New research suggests that the crop could have simply floated there on a ship. The origin of the sweet potato in the South Pacific has long been a mystery. The food crop undisputedly has its roots in the Andes. It was once thought to have been spread by Spanish and Portuguese sailors in the sixteenth century, but archaeological evidence indicates that Polynesians were cultivating the orange-fleshed tuber much earlier...

Earliest horse figures of Anatolia in Eskiºehir Tuesday, February 27, 2007 ANKARA – Turkish Daily News Horse figures painted on rock formations in Eskiºehir are the oldest in Anatolia, according to new archaeological research. The research revealed that the first known horse figures date back to 6,000 B.C. and that the area was settled in the early Neolithic period. The excavation and studies of Anatolia in Eskiºehir's Sivrihisar district were conducted jointly by Eskiºehir-based Anadolu University and the Eskiºehir Archaeology Museum. The Eskiºehir province lies directly to the west of Ankara.Ali Umut Türkcan of Anadolu University said rock paintings featuring...

Science traces roots of 'traditional English' apple back to central Asia By Richard Gray, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 25/02/2007 It is a taste of the English countryside, but the origins of the apple lie far from our shady orchards. English apples can be traced back over 7,000 years English apples are direct descendants of fruit trees growing in an inhospitable mountainous region of central Asia, plant scientists at Oxford University have discovered. The DNA of England's famous apple varieties is almost identical to that of fruit found in the Tian Shan forest which lies on the border of...

Domestication event: Why the donkey and not the zebra? By Eric Hand St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MCT) ST. LOUIS - A few years ago, Egyptologists found a new Pharaonic burial site more than 5,000 years old. They opened up a tomb. "They're expecting to find nobles, the highest courtiers," said Washington University archaeologist Fiona Marshall. "And what do they find? Ten donkey skeletons." "The ancient Egyptian burial shows how highly valued (donkeys) were for the world's first nation state. After the horse came, they became lower status. Of course, they're the butt of jokes and all the rest of it. That...

Horses First Domesticated in Kazakhstan? Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery NewsBotai Village Oct. 20, 2006 —New evidence from soil inside the remains of a 5,600-year-old corral indicates that the ancient Botai people of Kazakhstan were among the earliest to domesticate horses. But equine romantics might be disappointed to learn that the Botai probably ate and milked their horses as often as they rode them. The corrals are part of an archeological site in northern Kazakhstan known as Krasnyi Yar, once a large village occupied by the Copper-Age Botai, said Sandra Olsen, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Penn....

Chinese archaeologists probe origin of domestic horses through DNA www.chinaview.cn 2006-04-01 15:55:19 BEIJING, April 1 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists are studying the DNA samples extracted from the bones of horses unearthed from ancient sites to probe the origin of domestic horses in China. It's still a mystery to archaeologists when and where horses were first tamed in China, said Cai Dawei, a researcher with the center of archaeological research for China's border area under the Jilin University in Northwest China. The DNA research will offer valuable clues on the study of migration, spread and domestication of horses, Cai said. A...

Horse antibodies could combat a bird flu outbreak 12:16 28 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service Debora MacKenzie An old-fashioned method may offer a cheap and quick way to protect against the H5N1 bird flu virus. Chinese scientists have produced antibodies in horses that are an effective treatment for bird flu – at least in mice. Jiahai Lu at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and colleagues repeatedly inoculated horses with a chicken vaccine against H5N1 bird flu to make them produce antibodies. They then collected the horses’ blood, separated out the antibodies and split them to make them less likely to...