Project Overview
In many species, the initial capture and breeding of wild
populations took place in restricted episodes and in restricted
geographic areas. The current theory as expounded first by
Jansen and co-workers (2002), is that multiple lineages of
wild horses may have contributed to domesticated horses,
but to confirm this and to infer their geographic origin,
some knowledge of the wild species is essential. However,
there are no populations of truly
wild horses remaining anywhere in the world today.
We have theorised
that native horses, that is to say a group of horses that
have similar
characteristics
and are associated with a given locality,
often with ancesrty in the deep past, and horses from isolated
and remote regions, where difficult terrain reduced the impact
of Soviet Era Collectivisation, may have potentially
retained the genetic signatures of domestication.
We are studying the genetics of these isolated living
horse populations in central and east Asia. This project
is searching for phylogenetic and biogeographical patterns
initially in
the mitochondrial DNA of living horse populations, partly
in order to provide a framework within which ancient DNA
research
can be located.
Over the past two years, thanks to our many collaborators,
we have amassed a large set of samples from living horses
covering a broad geographical
area from Eastern Europe to Central China.
Fieldwork in remote places has allowed us, not only
to sample the genetics of horse populations from across
central and east Asia, but ot observe the human life-ways
that have preserved these isolated horse populations
and the human-horse relationships that are enacted in
these situations.
This work is funded
by the McDonald Institute and the Isaac Newton Trust
|
Feral Konik horses at the Stobnica Research Station on the
Farm Academy of Poznan, Poland
Megrel horses in Georgia (former USSR) are now extinct and
Tushin horses are endangered |
