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Deep in Tibet... the explorers came upon the first of the enigmatic creatures. They saw one, and then three of them grazing in the open forest. Soon, to their astonishment, a whole herd of the unusual horses appeared. "They looked completely archaic, like the horses in prehistoric cave paintings," said Michel Peissel, a French ethnologist and the expedition leader. "We thought it was just a freak, then we saw they were all alike." A team of French and British explorers, who have just returned here from a six-week expedition in Tibet, say they believe that they found an ancient breed...

Scientists have traced the origin of the 'speed gene' in Thoroughbred racehorses back to a single British mare that lived in the United Kingdom around 300 years ago, according to findings published today in the scientific journal Nature Communications. The origin of the 'speed gene' (C type myostatin gene variant) was revealed by analysing DNA from hundreds of horses, including DNA extracted from the skeletal remains of 12 celebrated Thoroughbred stallions born between 1764 and 1930. "Changes in racing since the foundation of the Thoroughbred have shaped the distribution of 'speed gene' types over time and in different racing regions,"...

Long thought by many as possible abstract or symbolic expressions as opposed to representations of real animals, the famous paleolithic horse paintings found in caves such as Lascaux and Chauvet in France likely reflect what the prehistoric humans actually saw in their natural environment, suggests researchers who conducted a recent DNA study. To reach this conclusion, scientists constituting an international team of researchers in the UK, Germany, USA, Spain, Russia and Mexico genotyped and analyzed nine coat-color types in 31 pre-domestic (wild) horses dating as far back as 35,000 years ago from bone specimens in 15 different locations spread across...

Remains of the oldest known Caspian horse, otherwise referred to as the "Kings' horse" due to its popularity among royals the world over, have been unearthed in northern Iran, according to CAIS. The more than 3,000-year-old remains were found at an Iranian site named Gohar-Tappeh. In ancient times, royals often chose Caspian horses to ride them into battle and/or to pull their chariots. During more recent history, individuals such as Price Philip of England have popularized the Caspian, which is the oldest breed of horse in the world still in existence. The Shah of Iran gifted such a horse to...

Back in 2004, when academics unearthed skeletons found at a house in the ancient Roman town that was covered in ashes in 79 AD, they thought it belonged to an extinct breed of horse... What happened really was that there seems to have been a mix-up in the lab, which led to horse DNA being combined with donkey DNA, creating an artificial hybrid that actually never existed. Six years ago, the skeletons of equids having belonged to a rich Roman household in Pompeii were analyzed. There were found in the stables of a probably wealthy politician, and all five of...

The baby animal above is not a zebra. And it's not a donkey. It's a zedonk. With a zebra father and a donkey mother, the animal has clear black and white stripes on its legs and the brown-haired body of a donkey. The eye-catching filly was born last Wednesday night at the Chestatee Wildlife Preserve in Dahlonega, Georgia, about 60 miles north of Atlanta. "She's absolutely beautiful," said Alison Womack, a volunteer at the preserve, adding that the foal is "fabulous, healthy, doing well." "We think we're going to name her Pippi, for Pippi Longstocking," said C.W. Wathen, the founder...

Genetic investigators say the partnership between people and the ancestors of today's donkeys was sealed not by monarchs trying to establish kingdoms, but by mobile, pastoral people who had to recruit animals to help them survive the harsh Saharan landscape in northern Africa more than 5,000 years ago. The findings, reported today by an international research team in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paint a surprising picture of what small, isolated groups of people were able to accomplish when confronted with unpredictable storms and expanding desert. "It says those early people were quite innovative, more so than many people...

In what part of the world were cats first found? And how did the different breeds arise? Cats were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the area known as the Fertile Crescent. This area stretches from Turkey to Northern Africa and includes Iran, Iraq and Egypt. Research data from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, where cat genetics are studied, suggests that Turkey is one of the sites of origin for the domestication of cats. Cats started living close to people when people ceased being nomadic herders and became farmers raising livestock and crops....

Small dogs the world over can all trace their ancestry back to the Middle East, where the first diminutive canines emerged more than 12,000 years ago. A new study, which appears in BMC Biology, focused on a single gene responsible for size in dogs. Researchers found that the version of the gene IGF1 that is a major determinant of small size in dogs probably originated as a result of domestication of the Middle Eastern gray wolf, which also happens to be smaller than many other wolves. In terms of which came first, big dogs or small dogs, the answer is...

If your face turns red after drinking just one glass of wine, blame ancient Chinese farmers. Researchers are reporting that the "Asian Flush" mutation cropped up just as rice was first being domesticated, and it may have protected early farmers from the harms of drinking too much. But some other scientists urge caution, saying that the dates may not match up. When you drink, enzymes in the liver known as alcohol dehydrogenases (ADHs) convert alcohol to an organic compound called acetaldehyde; another enzyme then converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid. But about 50% of Asians and 5% of Europeans have mutations...

Ancient DNA retrieved from extinct horse species from around the world has challenged one of the textbook examples of evolution - the fossil record of the horse family Equidae over the past 55 million years. The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved an international team of researchers and the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) based at the University of Adelaide. Only the modern horse, zebras, wild asses and donkey survive today, but many other lineages have become extinct over the last 50,000 years. ACAD Director Professor Alan Cooper says despite an excellent...

Today's dogs are all descended from a pack of wolves tamed 16,000 years ago on the shores of the Yangtze river, according to new research. It was previously known that the birthplace of the dog was eastern Asia but historians were not able to be more precise than that. However, now researchers have made a number of new discoveries about the history of man's best friend - including that the dog appeared about 16,000 years ago south of the Yangtze river in China. It has also been discovered that even though the dog has a single geographical origin it descends...

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...