Mitochondrial DNA and the Origins of the Domestic Horse

The place and date of the domestication of the horse has long been a matter for debate among archaeologists. To determine whether horses were domesticated from one or several ancestral horse populations, we sequenced the mitochondrial D-loop for 318 horses from 25 oriental and European breeds, inclu...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 99; no. 16; pp. 10905 - 10910
Main Authors Jansen, Thomas, Forster, Peter, Levine, Marsha A., Oelke, Hardy, Hurles, Matthew, Renfrew, Colin, Weber, Jürgen, Olek, Klaus
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 06.08.2002
National Acad Sciences
Subjects
Animal domestication
Animals
Animals, Domestic - classification
Animals, Domestic - genetics
Archaeology
Base Sequence
Biological Sciences
Biology
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
DNA, Complementary
DNA, Mitochondrial
Evolution, Molecular
Fossils
Genetic mutation
Horses
Horses - classification
Horses - genetics
Mitochondrial DNA
Molecular Sequence Data
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Sequencing
Steppes
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Summary:The place and date of the domestication of the horse has long been a matter for debate among archaeologists. To determine whether horses were domesticated from one or several ancestral horse populations, we sequenced the mitochondrial D-loop for 318 horses from 25 oriental and European breeds, including American mustangs. Adding these sequences to previously published data, the total comes to 652, the largest currently available database. From these sequences, a phylogenetic network was constructed that showed that most of the 93 different mitochondrial (mt)DNA types grouped into 17 distinct phylogenetic clusters. Several of the clusters correspond to breeds and/or geographic areas, notably cluster A2, which is specific to Przewalski's horses, cluster C1, which is distinctive for northern European ponies, and cluster D1, which is well represented in Iberian and northwest African breeds. A consideration of the horse mtDNA mutation rate together with the archaeological timeframe for domestication requires at least 77 successfully breeding mares recruited from the wild. The extensive genetic diversity of these 77 ancestral mares leads us to conclude that several distinct horse populations were involved in the domestication of the horse.
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Contributed by Colin Renfrew
To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: jansen@biopsytec.com.
Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in the GenBank database (accession nos. –).
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.152330099