On 2008-08-03 23:14, Rick McCallister wrote:
> My understanding is that before domestication (and after they died out
> in North America), wild horses were only found in the European forest
> and the Eurasian steppe. That they were not found south of the Caucasus
> or the Himalayas. Is that correct?
It's more or less true of the wild progenitor of the domesticated horse,
the Eurasian wild horse. The division of (sub)fossil _Equus ferus_ into
subspecies is a matter of much debate, but it's clear that Przewalski's
horse (whether or not regarded as a separate species) was not ancestral
to domesticated horses. Other equids are also ruled out by genetic
research. The genus _Equus_ includes also asses, zebras, kiangs and
hemiones (onagers etc.). One subspecies of the last of them, the khur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Wild_Ass
is native to India, and other wild hemiones are distributed from the
Near East to Central Asia and Tibet. None of them, however, has been
domesticated anywhere. It used to be thought that onagers were used as
draught animals in ancient Mesopotamia, but those animals are now
believed to have been domesticated asses imported from the west (the
African wild ass was domesticated at roughly the same time as the
Eurasian wild horse).
Piotr