500 years before horses entered ancient Syro-Mesopotamia, people were breeding ‘kungas’, hybrids of donkeys and Syrian wild asses.
Geigl and her colleagues analyzed a kunga’s genome, or genetic instruction book, and compared it with those of horses, donkeys and Asiatic wild asses, including the hemippe , which has been extinct since 1929. The kunga’s mother was a donkey and its father a hemippe, making it the oldest evidence of humans creating hybrid animals. A mule from 1000 B.C. in Anatolia reported by the same research group in 2020 is theGeigl thinks kungas were created for warfare, as they could pull wagons.
This mosaic scene on a Sumerian artifact, a wooden box dubbed the Standard of Ur that depicts war scenes, includes images of hybrid kungas pulling wagons.Coauthor E. Andrew Bennett, a paleogeneticist now at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, likens kungas to “bioengineered war machines.” But with the riddle of how kungas were made being solved a century after the last hemippe perished, “it’s impossible to make these animals again.
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