Hybrid animal in 4500-year-old tomb is earliest known bred by humans

The people of the Bronze Age crossed donkeys with wild asses to make horse-like hybrid animals.

There is life on January 14, 2022.

By Alice Klein.

The skeletons are from Tell Umm el-Marra.

Glenn Schwartz is a professor at the University.

The bones of horse-like creatures unearthed in a royal tomb in Syria are the earliest known hybrid animals bred by people, with the skulls showing them to be crosses of donkeys and Syrian wild asses.

Eva-Maria Geigl, a professor at the University of Paris in France, says that the discovery suggests that early civilisation in Syria was advanced technologically.

The skeletons of 25 animals were found in a royal burial complex 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 find out what the animals were, Geigl and her colleagues compared the genomes of other horse-like species from the region.

The animals were a hybrid of the domestic donkey and the Syrian wild ass. The cross went extinct last century, but it was possible to sequence its genes using teeth and bones from the 19th century.

The researchers believe the hybrid animals are examples ofkungas, mysterious horse-like creatures with donkey-like tails that appear on royal seals from early Bronze Age Syria and Mesopotamia.

The kungas were six times more expensive than the donkeys, according to clay tablets from the time. They were used to pull royal vehicles and war wagons.

According to Geigl, people in the region may have started crossing donkeys with Syrian wild asses after spotting them mating by chance and producing offspring with desirable qualities.

The kunga hybrid may have balanced the two because the donkeys are too slow for battlefields and the Syrian wild asses are too aggressive.

Special strategies would have to be used to capture the Syrian wild asses and bring them to the female donkeys so they could produce the hybrid.

The kunga breeding stopped after horses were introduced to the region around 4,000 years ago, according to study co-author Andy Bennett. He says that donkeys were a lot of work to breed and weren't as good as horses.

Science Advances is a journal.

Our Human Story is a free monthly newsletter about archaeology and human evolution.

There are more on these topics.