The first hybrid animal created by man has finally been identified: it is the “kunga”, an equine resulting from the crossing between wild and domestic donkeys, concludes a study published in the journal
Science Advance
on January 14.
Archaeologists had unearthed bones at the site of Umm el-Marra, in northern Syria.
The DNA analyzes carried out made it possible to date them to 4,500 years ago, which explains the hitherto unexplained representations of domestic horses in Mesopotamian art.
A new genome sequencing study in @ScienceAdvances has uncovered the earliest known evidence of hybrid animal breeding, confirming that mysterious 4500-year-old equid skeletons most likely belonged to domesticated hybrid animals called kungas.
https://t.co/tXMR7bCwZq pic.twitter.com/PDRL9L1tEy
— Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) January 14, 2022
Combine strength and speed
The kunga had a domestic donkey for mother and a wild donkey for father.
"Herders in Mesopotamia wanted to breed domestic donkeys with wild donkeys for strength and speed and maybe size," says Fiona Marshall, an archaeologist at the University of Washington, as quoted by
Geo
.
The kunga's mission was to tow four-wheeled tanks, especially during combat.
These crossings were certainly "industrialized" by the Mesopotamians, estimates on Europe 1 Eva-Maria Geigl, of the Jacques-Monod Institute.
But with the arrival of horses 4,000 years ago, the kungas disappeared.
Indeed, as a hybrid species, it could not reproduce, unlike other equines.
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