Donkeys are an almost ubiquitous beast of burden and, as in the past, they are regularly used to transport material over long distances. A team of geneticists now wanted to know exactly how old this past was. The team thinks they have determined when and where the first donkeys were domesticated.
By looking at 238 donkey genomes, 31 of which belong to ancient donkeys, the team identified an event of domestication thought to be around 5,000 BC, shortly before the earliest archaeological evidence of domesticated donkeys in East Africa. Their research was recently published in the journal Science.
“We have identified Horn+Kenya as home to donkeys that are closest to the first domesticated today,” study co-author Ludovic Orlando, a geneticist at Université Paul Sabatier in France, said in a statement. Just because their ancestors may have lived in another region nearby does not mean that this is the definitive homeland of the donkeys.”
The original origin of these pack animals seems most likely to be somewhere in northeastern Africa, such as Sudan or Egypt or even the Horn of Africa. The team believes that more archaeological studies will be needed to determine the donkey’s more precise starting point. New excavations may reveal material culture showing signs of donkey domestication.
A team including Orlando published details on the genetic history of the horse and its domestication in East Asia last year. This latest study could help scientists find more details about the two animals’ genetic histories and where they came together.
In addition, the researchers mapped the clear distribution patterns of donkeys between West Africa and Europe dating back to Roman times, and identified a previously unknown donkey lineage that existed in the Levant about 2,200 years ago.
Among the more than 200 donkey genomes they examined were genetic information from three female donkeys and six male donkeys from Roman France. The site, thought to date between AD 200 and AD 500, appears to have been a breeding ground for large donkeys. The research team suspects that the area may be one of many places that helped meet the demand for donkeys in the Roman Empire.
Earlier this year, archaeologists found evidence that the oldest human-bred hybrid animal was the kunga, a donkey-wild donkey hybrid. Orlando thinks the latest article may also help answer questions about the origins of the mule, the vicious offspring of donkeys and horses…
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