Hybrid animal in 4500-year-old tomb is earliest known bred by humans
Early Bronze Age people in Syria crossed donkeys with wild asses to make prized horse-like hybrids, demonstrating advanced understanding of animal breeding
The bones of horse-like creatures unearthed in a 4500-year-old royal tomb in Syria are the earliest known hybrid animals bred by people, with DNA sequencing showing them to be crosses of donkeys and Syrian wild asses.
The discovery suggests that early civilisation in what is now Syria was “really advanced technologically”, says Eva-Maria Geigl at the University of Paris in France.
In 2006, the complete skeletons of 25 animals were found in a 4500-year-old royal burial complex called Tell Umm el-Marra in northern Syria. Archaeologists were perplexed because they looked like horses but had different proportions, and horses weren’t thought to have been introduced to the area until 500 years later.
To work out what the animals were, Geigl and her colleagues sequenced DNA from their bones and compared it with the genomes of other horse-like species from the region.
