A Chinese soldier with weapons on his back, horse, watercolor of Charles Wirgman, Ca. 1857.
It says a popular phrase that the bad luck of the horses was to have the back with the perfect width to fit the hip of men. But what truly spoiled their lives was a mutation… that made them less nervous.
Horses did not change just the way people traveled: redefined the course of civilization.
However, scientists have always wondered how, exactly, the steppes’ wild animals have become companions unluckythey pulled carriages, transported warriors and eventually supported empires.
Now a new horsepower new DNA, recently published in the magazine Scienceoffers a precise answer: a genetic peculiarity In a single gene, called GSDMCIt helped turn nervous animals into more docile creatures that humans could seal and assemble.
After this genetic variant was spread to the population of these equines, The History of Humanity fired… Galloping.
The team of investigators, led by Xuexue Liu e Ludovic Orlandoresearchers at the University of Toulouse in France analyzed horses genomes from a period of thousands of years, and tracked 266 genetic markers linked to characteristics such as behavior, body size and hair color.
Its results suggest that early domestication has not begun with high coats or higher structures. Instead, the first creators, without surprise, selected the animals by their temperament.
One of the first signs of selection appeared in the gene ZFPM1connected in rats to Stress Anxiety and Tolerance. This genetic change, about 5,000 years ago, may have made the horses just a little calmer “Much doct enough for people to keep them around.”
But The true revolution came a few centuries later. About 4,200 years ago, horses with a particular version of the GSDMC gene began to dominate the population of the species.
In humans, variants close to this gene are associated with chronic pain in the back and spinal structure. But for horses and laboratory mice, the mutation remodels the vertebrae, Improves motor coordination and increases strength of the members. In short, Made the horsepower.
The numbers are impressive. The frequency of the GSDMC variant fired from 1% to almost 100% in just a few centuriesenhances a.
O paleogeneticista Laurent Frantzresearcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, who did not participate in the study, considers that this is a selection “almost unprecedented in evolution“.
For comparison, the human mutation that allows adults to digest milka feature with huge advantages of survival, spread much more slowly, with a selection force of only 2 to 6%.
“As Right conditions for the rise of the Montable Horse About 3,500 years ago in the European Steppe, north of the Caspian Sea, ”explains Frantz.“ It was then that local cultures began to search for animals for the war and transportation instead of food“.
The genetic stars were aligned: rare mutations already present in wild horses found human ambition.
