Skip to main content
Dryad

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

Gaunitz, Charleen1; Fages, Antoine1; Hanghøj, Kristian1; Albrechtsen, Anders2; Khan, Naveed1; Schubert, Mikkel1; Seguin-Orlando, Andaine1; Owens, Ivy J.3; Felkel, Sabine4; Bignon-Lau, Olivier5; de Barros Damgaard, Peter1; Mittnik, Alissa6; Mohaseb, Azadeh F.7; Davoudi, Hossein8; Alquraishi, Saleh9; Alfarhan, Ahmed H.9; Al-Rasheid, Khaled A. S.9; Crubézy, Eric10; Benecke, Norbert11; Olsen, Sandra12; Brown, Dorcas13; Anthony, David13; Massy, Ken14; Pitulko, Vladimir15; Kasparov, Aleksei15; Brem, Gottfried4; Hofreiter, Michael16; Mukhtarova, Gulmira17; Baimukhanov, Nurbol18; Lõugas, Lembi19; Onar, Vedat20; Stockhammer, Philipp W.6; Krause, Johannes6; Boldgiv, Bazartseren21; Undrakhbold, Sainbileg21; Erdenebaatar, Diimaajav22; Lepetz, Sébastien7; Mashkour, Marjan7; Ludwig, Arne23; Wallner, Barbara4; Merz, Victor24; Merz, Ilja24; Zaibert, Viktor25; Willerslev, Eske1; Librado, Pablo1; Outram, Alan K.3; Orlando, Ludovic1

Published Feb 19, 2019 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f9n5qm1

Data files

Feb 19, 2019 version files 1.16 GB

Abstract

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.