Jan 14, 2022 · Genetic analysis pegged these ancient and mysterious equine skeletons as donkey-wild ass hybrids. They were excavated from the 4,500-year-old burial complex at Umm el-Marra in northern...

Feb 2, 2022 · DNA reveals that these ancient and mysterious skeletons were donkey-wild ass hybrids. They were excavated from a 4,500-year-old burial complex in northern Syria. From mules to ligers, the list of human-bred hybrid animals is long. It’s also ancient, with the oldest of these being the kunga.

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,...

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 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 · To figure out the kunga’s true identity, the researchers turned to ancient skeletons of an unknown equid buried in Syria, the last surviving genetic material of an ass species, and the...

Jan 14, 2022 · The kunga bones for the latest study came from a princely burial complex at Tell Umm el-Marra in Northern Syria, which has been dated to around the early Bronze Age between 3000 B.C. and 2000...

Jan 14, 2022 · Donkeys have an easy-going temperament but are too slow for battlefields, while Syrian wild asses were fast but too wild and aggressive to be tamed, so the kunga hybrid may have balanced the two...

Jan 14, 2022 · In the new study, researchers analyzed DNA from 23 complete male equid skeletons about 4,500 years old unearthed at an ancient royal burial site, Umm el-Marra, in modern-day northern Syria.

Jan 17, 2022 · PARIS, FRANCE— Science News reports that analysis of a genome obtained from a 4,500-year-old equine skeleton discovered in northern Syria’s royal burial complex at Umm el-Marra suggests the...