Abstract
The horse is one of the last mega-herbivores to have been domesticated but certainly represents the one that most impacted human history. It provided past societies with fast mobility, new ways to make war, and facilitated pastoralism and farming. The history of the domestic horse, from the early stages more than 4000 years ago, to the modern breeding of racing champions, remained poorly understood. In the last few years, the sequencing of extensive genome time-series for horses has helped write entirely new chapters about their domestication history. It revealed their original homeland in the steppes of the lower Don-Volga, rewrote the evolutionary origins of the now extinct-in-the-wild Przewalski's horses and tracked the geographic and temporal spread of some of the key selective breeding targets for traits such as high-stature, speed and more. I will show how my group harnessed the latest methodological advances in ancient DNA research to gain new understanding of the process and history underlying horse domestication.
Speaker
Prof. Ludovic Orlando, from the University of Toulouse, France.
Notice the timing! The seminar takes place one hour earlier than usual.
Please note that Ludovic is visiting us here at IBV/CEES and this seminar will take place in person in the Kristine Bonnevies seminar room 3508. There will be no hybrid solutions this year for the seminar series, so do please add the event to your agenda.