Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski’s horses

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from American Association for the Advancement of Science via the DOI in this recordThere is another ORE record for this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/31710The Eneolithic Botai culture of the Central Asian steppes provides the earliest archaeological evidence for horse husbandry, ~5,500 ya, but the exact nature of early horse domestication remains controversial. We generated 42 ancient horse genomes, including 20 from Botai. Compared to 46 published ancient and modern horse genomes, our data indicate that Przewalski’s horses are the feral descendants of horses herded at Botai and not truly wild horses. All domestic horses dated from ~4,000 ya to present only show ~2.7% of Botai-related ancestry. This indicates that a massive genomic turnover underpins the expansion of the horse stock that gave rise to modern domesticates, which coincides with large-scale human population expansions during the Early Bronze Age.This work was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research, Natural Sciences (4002-00152B); the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF94); Initiative d'Excellence Chaires d'attractivité, Université de Toulouse (OURASI); the Publishing in Elite Journals Program (PEJP-17), Vice Rectorate for Graduate Studies and Scientific Research, King Saud University; the Villum Fonden miGENEPI research project; the European Research Council (ERC-CoG-2015-681605); the Taylor Family-Asia Foundation Endowed Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology; the Innovation Fund of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW); the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management, and; the Russian Science Foundation (16-18-10265-RNF)