The kunga was a hybrid equid that was used as a draft animal in ancient Syria and Mesopotamia, where it also served as an economic and political status symbol. Cuneiform writings from as early as the mid-third millennium BCE describe the animal as a hybrid but do not provide the precise taxonomical nature of the breeding that produced it.

Jan 14, 2022 · We conclude that kungas were F1 hybrids between female domestic donkeys and male hemippes, thus documenting the earliest evidence of hybrid animal breeding. In the third millennium BCE, urbanized, socially stratified, and literate societies appeared for the first time in Syria and northern Mesopotamia (1, 2).

Jan 16, 2022 · The Kunga, the researchers found, is the first identified case of two species' human-engineered hybrid, a production very far from the traditional process of animal domestication.

Jul 17, 2023 · Numerous cuneiform tablets reference Mesopotamia’s widespread reliance on a mysterious equid: the kunga. The kunga, genetic analysis of fossilized specimen has determined, was one of the...

Meet the kunga, the first known instance of a human-engineered hybrid – bred from a donkey and a Syrian wild ass. A burial site in Umm el-Marra, Syria, where the skeletons of 44 kungas were uncovered.

Jan 17, 2022 · Researchers from Paris said that people from ancient Mesopotamia have been breeding super-strength donkeys based on the 4,500-year old skeletons they found in a burial site at Umm el-Marra in...

Jan 14, 2022 · Bronze Age bioengineers created the earliest hybrid animal – a majestic horselike creature known as a kunga that had a donkey mom, a Syrian wild ass for a father and lived 4,500 years ago,...

Jan 14, 2022 · That animal is a kunga, which the researchers show was a cross between a female donkey and a male Syrian wild ass. Kungas were valuable in Mesopotamia, costing up to six times as much as a donkey.

Jan 14, 2022 · Syria’s 4,500-year-old kungas were donkey-wild ass hybrids, genetic analysis reveals, so the earliest known example of humans crossing animal species.

The first known human-made hybrid animal is the now-extinct kunga, a big, powerful equine form used to pull war wagons and royal chariots, which was an F1 (first generation) hybrid form produced approximately 4,500 years ago in the Middle East by mating female domestic donkeys (Equus africanus asinus) with male Syrian wild asses (E. hemionus ...