Posted on 04/29/2012 5:53:32 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
For many years archeologists and other scientists have debated the origins of the domesticated horse. Nailing down a time frame is important because many historians view the relationship between man and horse as one of the most important in the development of our species. Horses allowed early people to hunt for faster prey, to wander farther than before and to create much bigger farms due to pulling plows. Now, new evidence has come to light suggesting that all modern horses, which are believed to have been domesticated approximately 10,000 years ago, descended from one mare around 140,000 years ago. The new evidence comes from a team made up of international researchers who, as they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say that DNA evidence shows that the horse subsequently diverged into 18 different genetic lines, suggesting that domestication occurred independently in many places throughout the world.
Most other domestic animals such as cows, sheep and goats by contrast appear to have evolved from a relatively small pool, likely shortly before horses followed suit.
Interestingly, horses appear in cave art as early as 30,000 years ago, which suggests that early humans certainly knew about them and likely killed them for food for twenty thousand years before the idea of taming them came about which ultimately led to domestication...
Prior to this new research many scholars had attributed the first domestication of the horse to the Eurasian Steppes, due to fossilized evidence showing horse domestication dating to around 3500 BC. This new research will undoubtedly cause new discussions in the community as a whole which will likely lead to new theories being developed to describe how so many different groups of people came to domestic horses in so many places.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Amen to that.
I’m here all weak, also. . . .
Good logic. Please post at original site. :)
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