Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The origins of modern horses are a bit mysterious, because they have
only one close living relative. But it is likely that they were fi rst domesticated
in eastern central Asia, in the same huge region of open plains and mountain
valleys where dogs and yaks were also tamed.
The only living relative of the modern horse is the Przewalski or Mon-
golian horse of central Asia. The horse was named after Polish naturalist
Colonel Nikolai Przewalski, who explored the area in the 1870s and 1880s.
He obtained a skull and hide of the horse that bears his name and shipped
them to Europe.
These small tough horses, with their dark legs, tan bodies, and wire-brush
manes that stand straight up, have survived by a fl uke. About a hundred and
fi fty of them were captured and sent to zoos in Europe at the beginning of
the twentieth century. But they continued to be hunted in their homeland.
The wild Przewalski's horses were fi nally driven to extinction in Asia half
a century ago. The last of them—and indeed the last truly wild horse any-
where in the world—was glimpsed in 1969, in the barren mountains of west-
ern China, not far south of where I saw the wolf cub.
The Przewalski's horses that survived in zoos have been crossed to domes-
tic horses, so that no completely unmixed strains remain. Some mostly wild
strains of these horses were recently reintroduced into Mongolia and China.
My colleague Oliver Ryder, who was involved with the Mongolian reintro-
duction, has shown that the purest Przewalski's horses today are descended
from only four zoo females.
The history of the Przewalski's horses is intertwined with that of the
ki's horses and domesticated horses share the branches of a single family tree.
Only one unusual mitochondrial genome has been found in a Przewalski's
horse. All their other mitochondrial genomes resemble those of domestic
horses. It seems that the hybridization between domestic and Przewalski's
horses has been extensive, so that some of the Przewalski genetic informa-
tion may have been lost.
The data are not yet complete enough to see whether domestic horses
could have had a single origin. There is, however, one striking piece of evi-
dence suggesting that something dramatic happened during or after horse
