Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski’s horses

Charleen Gaunitz , Antoine Fages , Kristian Hanghøj , Anders Albrechtsen (1) , Naveed Khan , Mikkel Schubert (2) , Andaine Seguin-Orlando (2) , Ivy Owens , Sabine Felkel , Olivier Bignon-Lau (3) , Peter de Barros Damgaard , Alissa Mittnik (4) , Azadeh Mohaseb (5) , Hossein Davoudi (6) , Saleh Alquraishi , Ahmed H Alfarhan (7) , Khaled Al-Rasheid , Eric Crubézy (8) , Norbert Benecke , Sandra Olsen , Dorcas Brown , David Anthony , Ken Massy , Vladimir Pitulko , Aleksei Kasparov , Gottfried Brem (9) , Michael Hofreiter (10) , Gulmira Mukhtarova , Nurbol Baimukhanov , Lembi Lõugas , Vedat Onar , Philipp Stockhammer , Johannes Krause (11) , Bazartseren Boldgiv , Sainbileg Undrakhbold , Diimaajav Erdenebaatar , Sébastien Lepetz (5) , Marjan Mashkour (5) , Arne Ludwig (12) , Barbara Wallner , Victor Merz , Ilja Merz , Viktor Zaibert , Eske Willerslev (13) , Pablo Librado (13) , Alan Outram , Ludovic Orlando (13)

1 Bioinformatics Centre
2 UCPH - University of Copenhagen = Københavns Universitet
3 ArScAn - Archéologies et Sciences de l'Antiquité
4 MPI-SHH - Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
5 AASPE - Archéozoologie, archéobotanique : sociétés, pratiques et environnements
6 Archaeozoological section, Bioarchaeological laboratory
7 KSU - King Saud University [Riyadh]
8 LA - Laboratoire d'Anthropobiologie
9 Institute of Animal Breeding and Genetics, Department for Biomedical Sciences
10 Department of Evolutianory Genetics
11 DAG - Department of Archaeogenetics [Jena]
12 RUB - Ruhr University Bochum = Ruhr-Universität Bochum
13 Section for GeoGenetics

The Eneolithic Botai culture of the Central Asian steppes provides the earliest archaeological evidence for horse husbandry, ~5500 years ago, but the exact nature of early horse domestication remains controversial. We generated 42 ancient-horse genomes, including 20 from Botai. Compared to 46 published ancient- and modern-horse genomes, our data indicate that Przewalski's horses are the feral descendants of horses herded at Botai and not truly wild horses. All domestic horses dated from ~4000 years ago to present only show ~2.7% of Botai-related ancestry. This indicates that a massive genomic turnover underpins the expansion of the horse stock that gave rise to modern domesticates, which coincides with large-scale human population expansions during the Early Bronze Age.

Domaines: Génétique animale; Archéologie et Préhistoire

Charleen Gaunitz, Antoine Fages, Kristian Hanghøj, Anders Albrechtsen, Naveed Khan, et al.. Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski’s horses. Science, 2018, 360 (6384), pp.111-114. ⟨10.1126/science.aao3297⟩. ⟨hal-02406833⟩