Change of seriousness...selective breeding

Different than than seriousness of the whole issue of horse slaughter and unwanted horses...is the whole deal about equine domestication and selective breeding. When I was reading this weekend I stumbled upon an article about this, and some of the new findings that are out there, a little bit of a lighter issue : )

The oldest physical evidence about when the domestication of the horse happened, was from Ukraine and was dated back to 2000 B.C. HOWEVER, the article was suggesting that two teams of archeologists have unearthed new articfacts suggesting that horses may have been domesticated farther east and about 1,000 years earlier. A team in Berlin has been focusing on coat colors, and noticed that before domestication, horses had either black or brown coats, and after domestication there coat colors changed, and this was because of selective breeding...That's funny, because I just in biology class today, and we were talking about this whole thing of selective breeding...

Some people at American, German and Spanish universities, were also anlyzing the DNA in equine reminas from Siberia, China, and many other countries. The results were interesting...it showed that the horse coat colors were consistent for many many years, and then about 5,000 years ago the number of colors uddenly increased. The best way to explain this, they say, is domestication and seletive breeding by humans.

This also backups studies done in central Asian Botai culture. They have much evidence that proves that horses were domesticated about 5,500 years ago. They can prove this because the horse skulls they observed showed evidence having having bits in their mouths. They also found leather bridles when they found these equine skulls. They also found evidence of mare's milk in pottery. THIS would indicate that horses were milked.

This last piece of evidence I found interesting...They said that some of the horse's metacarpal bones wore differently than some of the wild horses. They say that this proves that they were ridden more than 5,000 years ago.

It's interesting what they can find out with new research and techniques...