Russia Is the Homeland of the Horse

Russian horses are the winners, and all the others are losers.

Not a joke (cf. "Russia is the homeland of the elephants," which refers to the Soviet government's habit of claiming that all great things came from Russia); from the National Geographic (Rebecca Dzombak):

Because people in the Volga-Don region bred horses for domestication and quickly began migrating to new places with them, this new line of horses soon spread from western Europe to eastern Asia and beyond.

The migration "was almost overnight," says [molecular archaeologist Ludovic] Orlando, whose study was published on October 20 in Nature. "This was not something that built up over thousands of years."

"As they expanded, they replaced all the previous lineages that were roaming around Eurasia," he says. The domestic horse we know today "is the winner, the one we see everywhere, and the other types are sort of the losers."

Comments

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I've seen other references to this study. One crucial aspect is that these horses had two mutations which made them more easily domesticated.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

It is also interesting that he thinks the domesticated slave horses are the winners, and the undomesticated wild horses running free are the losers. He must be a Democrat 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

[Absaroka]

That's sort of an interesting biological question. If there are (just making these numbers up) 10 billion domesticated chickens and 100K of their wild progenitors, from a biological POV, who are the winners and losers?

Or wild maize and domesticated corn.

If you define 'success' as 'largest population', domestication can look pretty good.

Obligatory meme. But which lineage is more likely to go extinct, pugs or wolves?

[Krychek_2]

The analogy I've used is that a stray cat has perfect freedom, but is also much more likely to get eaten by a predator, hit by a car, die of rabies or starvation, or freeze to death in the winter. A housecat, on the other hand, has most of its decision made by its master, but is far more likely to have a happier, longer, and less painful life. So which cat is better off?

And if you want to make this about political philosophy, I don't think those two options -- complete freedom or no freedom -- are the only two possibilities. It's a continuum. The question is how much freedom is possible while at the same time ensuring a basic safety net.

[bernard11]

In terms of reproductive success, which is what evolution is about, the domesticated horses and chickens are overwhelmingly more successful.

[Absaroka]

Temporarily so, at least 🙂

But if humans go away, I bet the wild turkeys fare a lot better than the domesticated ones. Or consider how many oxen live in the U.S. today relative to the 1800's.

[bernard11]

Temporarily is what matters.

A dramatic change in the environment may have lots of different effects on species.

[MatthewSlyfield]

My understanding is that there are no undomesticated wild horses running around anywhere. What's running around are feral domesticated horses.

[Martinned]

Didn't the horses that were there before all die from some disease that these Volga-Don horses were immune from? (I have a book here somewhere about genetic archaelogy that explains it all, but I don't have time to dig it out.)

[Voize of Reazon]

The horses traced to Volga-Don are the domesticated varieties, those cowed, pathetic creatures kowtowing to their masters. Russia can have them. Their ancestors evolved in North America, wild and free, untrammeled by the jackboot of servitude. Make Equines Great Again!

[Titus PUllo]

Horses and modern man are both from mother Russia...central asia..everyone knows that..