From The Local:
An international team of researchers led by a German scientist believe they have found the first evidence that spotted horses, often seen depicted in cave paintings, actually existed tens of thousands of years ago.
“We are just starting to have the genetic tools to access the appearance of past animals and there are still a lot of question marks and phenotypes for which the genetic process has not yet been described,” said study leader Melanie Pruvost of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and the Department of Natural Sciences at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. “However, we can already see that this kind of study will greatly improve our knowledge about the past.”
The spots on the cave horses were previously believed to have been a depiction of some kind of shamanic vision, rather than reality.
The unravelling of the equine genome continues to fascinate. In the last two hundred years there have been many theories about the number and range of “Ur horse” types or breeds, with the dun takhi/Przewalski and the mouse-grey tarpan having the best archaeological records. Now there’s a new cave horse, and it’s an appaloosa.
Detailed article here, in the NYT.