From mules to ligers, the listing of human-made hybrid animals is lengthy. And, it seems, historical.
Meet the kunga, the earliest recognized hybrid animal bred by folks. The historical equine from Syro-Mesopotamia existed round 4,500 years in the past and was a cross between a donkey and a hemippe, a sort of Asiatic wild ass, researchers report January 14 in Science Advances.
Horses didn’t seem on this area of Asia till 4,000 years in the past, centuries after their domestication in Russia (SN: 10/20/21). But dozens of equine skeletons had been excavated within the early 2000s from a royal burial complicated relationship again to 2600 B.C. at Umm el-Marra in northern Syria. The animals, whose bodily options didn’t match any recognized equine species, look like “kungas” — horselike animals seen in art work and referenced in clay tablets predating horses by centuries.
“They were highly valued, very expensive,” says paleogeneticist Eva-Maria Geigl of Institut Jacques Monod in Paris.
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Geigl and her colleagues analyzed a kunga’s genome, or genetic instruction e-book, and in contrast it with these of horses, donkeys and Asiatic wild asses, together with the hemippe (Equus hemionus hemippus), which has been extinct since 1929. The kunga’s mom was a donkey and its father a hemippe, making it the oldest proof of people creating hybrid animals. A mule from 1000 B.C. in Anatolia reported by the identical analysis group in 2020 is the subsequent oldest hybrid.
Geigl thinks kungas had been created for warfare, as they may pull wagons. Coaxing donkeys into harmful conditions is difficult, she says, and no Asiatic wild ass may be tamed. But a hybrid might need had the traits folks sought.
Coauthor E. Andrew Bennett, a paleogeneticist now on the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, likens kungas to “bioengineered war machines.” But with the riddle of how kungas had been made being solved a century after the final hemippe perished, “it’s impossible to make these animals again.”