2002/07/18 by Thomas Jansen, Peter Forster, Marsha A. Levine +5 · 11 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Veterinary · #Genetic diversity and population structure #Genetic and phenotypic traits in livestock #Veterinary Equine Medical Research
paper · doi:10.1073/pnas.152330099
openalex publication_date 2002/07/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
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.