New Genetic Study Sheds Light on One of The Biggest Mysteries of Human History: Domestication of Horses

In the animal kingdom, dogs are usually the ones that get credit for being "man's best friend," but many of the accomplishments of humankind can be attributed to horses, more specifically the domestication of horses.

A new genetic study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that there are 125 possible genes that enabled our ancestors to tame the horses, according to Chicago Tribune.

The leading author of the study, Ludovic Orlando, from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, said that certain desirable traits of horses related to skeletal muscles, balance, coordination, and cardiac strenght were favored by ancient breeders. Along with physical traits our ancestors also favored behavioral traits such as social behavior, learning, fear response and agreeableness. The result of this process of selection for thousands of years is the "modern" horse, Chicago Tribune reported.

The mobility that horsepower provided revolutionized the way our ancestors lived and it also probably shifted human history towards what it has been until today. When humans started to get on horseback, it changed the whole game. It revolutionized the way we fought, and the way we trade. It also made the movement of people and the transmission of ideas easier and faster, which contributed to the accumulation of knowledge that is the base of science and discovery.

Scientist have been trying to solve the mystery of the domestication of horses for decades now. The biggest obstacle they faced was the non-existence of wild descendants of ancient breeds. Without wild horses related to the ancient breeds, scientists were unable to make a DNA comparison to discover what changed in horse genetics over the course of domestication.

In order to overcome this obstacle, scientists examined DNA from 29 ancient horse bones that were discovered in Siberia. The age of the bones ranged between 16,000 and 43,000 years. Then they compared the DNA extracted from ancient bones to the DNA collected from five modern breeds. The analysis showed that some genes modern horses carry were non-existent in ancient ones, which reveals that those genes were products of recent mutations, reported the Tribune.