The kungas were thought to be from the Middle East because of the marks on their teeth and the fact that they had been fed. Glenn Schwartz is a professor at John'sHopkins University.
A new study shows that Mesopotamians used hybrid donkeys and wild asses to pull their war wagons 500 years before horses were bred for the purpose.
The analysis of ancient DNA from animal bones unearthed in northern Syria resolves a long-standing question of just what type of animals were the "kungas" described in ancient sources as pulling war wagons.
Eva-Maria Geigl, a genomicist, said that the skeletons were equids, but they did not fit the measurements of the donkeys and wild asses. It was not clear what the difference was.
The study shows that kungas were a strong, fast and sterile hybrid of a female domestic donkey and a male Syrian wild ass.
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The process of breeding kungas could be explained by the fact that they are highly prized and expensive beasts.
She said that the kunga had to be bred with a female donkey and a male wild ass, which had to be captured, because they were sterile.
She said that it was difficult because wild asses were impossible to tame and could run faster than donkeys and kungas.
Geigl told Live Science that the hybrid was bio- engineered. The earliest hybrid was the one that they had to do each time they produced a kunga, so it explains why they were so valuable.
War animals.
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The British Museum has a war panel from the "Standard of Ur" that shows teams of kungas drawing four-wheeled wall wagons. The image is from the CNRS-Université de Paris.
The Assyrian capital Nineveh has a carved stone panel that shows two men leading an untamable wild ass they have captured. Eva-Maria Geigl is a researcher at the CNRS-Université de Paris.
The image 1 of 2 is a picture.
The British Museum has a war panel from the "Standard of Ur" that shows teams of kungas drawing four-wheeled wall wagons. The image is from the CNRS-Université de Paris.
The second image of 2.
The Assyrian capital Nineveh has a carved stone panel that shows two men leading an untamable wild ass they have captured. Eva-Maria Geigl is a researcher at the CNRS-Université de Paris.
The British Museum in London has a display on the "Standard of Ur," a mosaic from about 4,500 years ago that depicts four-wheeled war wagons.
Archaeologists thought they were a hybrid donkey, but they didn't know it was a hybrid.
She said that some experts thought Syrian wild asses were too small to be bred to produce kungas.
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The bones of the kungas were excavated a decade ago from a burial mound in northern Syria. Glenn Schwartz is a professor at John'sHopkins University.
The last Syrian wild ass died in 1927 at the Tiergarten Schnbrunn in Vienna, and its remains are now preserved in that city.
The researchers compared the genomes from the bones of the last Syrian wild ass from Vienna and the 11,000-year-old bones of a wild ass unearthed at the archaeological site of Gbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey.
The ancient wild ass was much larger than the same animal. She said that the Syrian wild ass species had become smaller in recent times due to environmental pressures.
Ancient Mesopotamia.
The first domesticated horses were introduced from the north of the Caucasus Mountains, 500 years before the first kungas were bred, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.
The Assyrian capital of Nineveh has a stone panel in the British Museum that shows two men leading a wild ass.
The kunga bones were found at a site in Northern Syria that is thought to be the ruins of a Bronze Age burial complex.
The bones were excavated by the study co-author about 10 years ago. The animals from Tell Umm el-Marra were kungas because of the marks on their teeth and the fact that they had been fed rather than left to eat.
She said that the practice of using kungas to pull war wagons probably continued after the introduction of domesticated horses into Mesopotamia.
The last kungas died and no more were bred from donkeys and wild asses because domesticated horses were easier to breed.
The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
Live Science published the original article.
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