Stallions from Lippizaner to frieze seem to have surprisingly similar male genes. The animals are result of over thousands breeding and ir genome now leads to a common ancestor. This is reported by researchers from an international team headed by Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin (Science Advances: Wutke et al., 2018).

The original stallion is refore probably from ice Age. Because of its outstanding properties, breeders have resorted to ir genes over millennia. The nomads of Eurasian steppe, i.e. between China and Hungary, were first to breed horses. The Romans later played an even more important role. They concentrated in selection mainly on stallions, rar than on mares: y can prove to be fully executable many offspring. Or stallion lines gradually disappeared from genetic pool.

The scientists examined samples of stallions of different ages, oldest of which were more than 100,000 years old. While female X chromosome is also very diverse in horses of recent times, re is little variation in male Y chromosome. This is most unusual for farm animals of our time, researchers write.

For her study, research team investigated tiny sections on Y chromosome part from Erbgutresten, which y had extracted from fossil teeth and bones of horses from excavations in Europe and Asia. The 350 samples came from 96 horses from different ages: starting with animals from copper and Bronze Age, i.e. first years of horse breeding, to breeding stallions from Middle Ages.

The study states that period studied is "almost entire history of taming horses". Random demographic effects and founding effect are excluded. For diversity of today's Pferdegene, supremacy of Y chromosome is not necessarily a problem. There are Welteit 48 million mares – four times as many as stallions.

Date Of Update: 19 April 2018, 12:03