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The makeup of the modern horse:

a history of the biological changes introduced by human management

SEE OUR LATEST ARTICLE ON THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DONKEYS
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    About:   

The human-horse relationship in History   

PEGASUS is an ERC-funded, five-year research project headed by Professor Ludovic Orlando, both appointed at the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the CNRS AMIS laboratory, University of Toulouse, France.

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This project will undertake to truly merge approaches in humanities and biosciences for the first time, aiming at understanding how humans forged the modern horse through history, from early domestication times to the advent of modern breeds. Since horses represent the animal that perhaps most impacted history, PEGASUS  will in turn investigate how novel equine traits and/or technologies circled back to humans, empowering warfare, agriculture, and transportation.

 

The project has officially started on December 1st, 2016, and will include 31 partners and collaborators, spread across 10 countries. These, and the 4 additional researchers to-be-hired, will provide expertise in the complementary fields of ancient DNA, genetics, history, and archeology. Due to the covid-19 pandemics, the project is extended until November 30th, 2022.

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Want to join in? Share samples and/or material? Please contact us.

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    Official Project Summary    

Background

 

The horse provided us with rapid transportation, an almost unrivaled secondary product that tremendously impacted the politico-economical trajectory of our societies, revolutionizing the circulation of ideas, people, languages, religions and communication. Horse chariotry and cavalry also changed warfare and beyond the battlefield new equestrian technologies have stimulated agricultural productivity. However, the 5,500 year long history of horse domestication and management, which transformed the natural evolutionary trajectory of wild horses into the more than 625 domestic breeds living today, is difficult to reconstruct from archaeology, history and modern genetics alone. Yet, with archaeogenetics, one can access the genetic information from past individuals and track in great detail past population trajectories.

Approach

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In this project, we propose to build on the latest advances in the analysis of ancient DNA molecules to gather new genomic, epigenomic and metagenomic information from ancient horses. This will be integrated with archaeozoological, isotopic and historical data to enhance our understanding of the multiple processes underlying the transformation of the animal that perhaps most impacted our history.

Main Objectives
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Starting from the characterization of pre-domestic populations of wild horses, we will evaluate the genomic and dietary impact of early domestication stages and will explore whether horses were independently domesticated in Iberia and the Pontic-Caspian steppe. We will follow how the emergence of chariotry and the development of heavy cavalry impacted the horse’s behavioural, physiological and biological makeup. We will reveal the horse characteristics that were preferred in various historical contexts and will investigate a diversity of management strategies and husbandry conditions to reveal their impact on horses, from classical and late antique periods until the recent creation of modern breeds by means of intensive selective breeding.

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    Work    

    Contact    

Prof. Ludovic Orlando

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Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse

CAGT, CNRS UMR 5288

University of Toulouse, France


ludovic.orlando@univ-tlse3.fr

Tel: +33628179510

WebsiteFR

 

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