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Spotted Horses May Have Roamed Europe 25,000 Years Ago

Posted by Unknown on from the space-horses-run-the-cia dept.

sciencehabit writes with an excerpt from Science: "About 25,000 years ago, humans began painting a curious creature on the walls of European caves. Among the rhinos, wild cattle, and other animals, they sketched a white horse with black spots. Although such horses are popular breeds today, scientists didn't think they existed before humans domesticated the species about 5000 years ago. Now, a new study of prehistoric horse DNA concludes that spotted horses did indeed roam ancient Europe, suggesting that early artists may have been reproducing what they saw rather than creating imaginary creatures."

46 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We (in Europe) prefer to call them cows.

    1. Re:Well by laejoh · · Score: 1

      In ancient times...
      Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
      Lived a strange race of people... the Druids

      No one knows who they were or what they were doing
      But their legacy remains
      Hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge

      Well... now we know what the Druids were doing. They were painting horses!

    2. Re:Well by Inda · · Score: 2, Informative

      He must.

      Slashdot has been doing +1 before numbers were invented.

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    3. Re:Well by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 1

      Slashdotters were +1-ing posts long before Google+ came about.

    4. Re:Well by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      -1 grumpy

    5. Re:Well by ryzvonusef · · Score: 1

      I am sure female horses lactate, they are mammals too /pedantic

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  2. Damn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Damn, and I was rooting for psychedelic use among cave painters.

  3. Realistic vs Imagination by tetrahedrassface · · Score: 1

    While spotted horses once ran and roamed the fertile plains of Europe, they may have been a small subset of the total horse population. Maybe the spotted horses were made fun of. Maybe the cave-people laughed as they graced the walls of caves with their likeness. It's never been easy to be different, and possibly the cave-people just wanted to say to history.. 'we have diversity too'. Or, maybe not. Maybe all the horses were spotted. Maybe some were striped, or perhaps looked like a Palomino. Would we feel differently then? Actually, the cave-people drew what they saw because they were cave-people. They weren't drawing imaginary cities or imaginary trees... How is this news really? Spotted horses are great, if you like horses.

    Also, Dear Slashdot: Please get a Google + page and post these article to Google plus, so I don't ever have to visit the darkside of the force of facebook again. Thank you. :)

    1. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by NoobixCube · · Score: 1

      Anyone here, really, could (unethically) make a Slashdot page on G+ and doggedly keep track of the stories for the benefit of the whole world. Pity we're all lazy bastards...

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    2. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Any real slashdotter would automate it. Today's xkcd applies.

    3. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you don't like going to Facebook to find out what's on Slashdot, the following link is extremely useful:

      http://www.slashdot.org

    4. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by Inda · · Score: 1

      I like horses - mainly nags - but this was a story I skipped on the BBC yesterday because I cannot see any point to it.

      Brown is the only colour that matters with horses. The brown horse always wins.

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    5. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

      I use the RSS feed for my google home page.

      Every time I use google there is the list of the 9 most recent Slashdot articles approved.

      Don't know why Google only allows 9 not 10... I think the people from the "snooze timer institute" have been sleeping with some of the google execs.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    6. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's trinary: 3^2 is 9. Slashdot is a computer-oriented site, and computers work in trinary numbers, expressing everything as zero, one, or CowboyNeal. This system was pioneered by C. S. Peirce, the only American philosopher and physicist to be kicked out of both Harvard and Princeton for moral turpitude: his trinary-based logic lies at the heart of Slashcode, the efficient, well-designed, standards-compliant and always fully functional content management system that delivers fresh, non-reduplicated, authentic news free of astroturfing, dupes, and slashvertisements to your door every morning along with your milk.

    7. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by Frenzied+Apathy · · Score: 1

      ^^ This

      I keep an eye on the latest /. postings from my iGoogle page, too. That way I don't end up visiting /. only to find out the story is useless and a waste of my time, like that stupid story about spotted horses from 25,000 years ago.

      Wait - I umm - oops...

      --
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    8. Re:Realistic vs Imagination by dotancohen · · Score: 1

      If you don't like going to Facebook to find out what's on Slashdot, the following link is extremely useful:

      http://www.slashdot.org

      I just recently started reading my /. here:
      http://alterslash.org/

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  4. Re:Wait a moment... by Dreth · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...humans began painting a curious creature on the walls of European caves. Among the rhinos...

    Did I miss a memo?

    It was written on the wall! How could you have missed it?

    --
    All glory to Arstotzka!
  5. Re:Wait a moment... by Calydor · · Score: 5, Informative

    Europe had a breed of rhino, actually. It's extinct now.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_rhinoceros

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  6. Spotted by jimshatt · · Score: 2

    So these cavemen were horse-spotters! Bwahahaha.

    1. Re:Spotted by Remus+Shepherd · · Score: 1

      They were spotted horse spotters who were spotting walls with spotted horses they had spotted.

      --
      Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
  7. Re:Wait a moment... by Robert+Zenz · · Score: 1

    So I did miss the memo. ;)

    I did a quick search but nothing turned up, thanks for the link!

  8. It never ceases to amaze me... by MikeRT · · Score: 4, Insightful

    how much many modern people assume our primitive ancestors were total morons who had more in common with a screaming chimp than modern humans in their ability to grasp what they saw happening around them. How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this instead of perhaps prizing the spotted horses as more aesthetically pleasing to their sensibilities?

    When you look at what many of the "scientifically-minded" believed in the 19th and early 20th century like phrenology, eugenics, "the noble savage" and a host of other things it is downright shocking that any remotely history-literate person can be so arrogant.

    1. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by cfc-12 · · Score: 2

      How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this instead of perhaps prizing the spotted horses as more aesthetically pleasing to their sensibilities?

      I agree with your main point, but I'm not sure arrogant is the right word. Surely it would take a more advanced mind to invent and draw an animal that nobody has ever seen before than just to draw something that you see every day.

      I'm not sure why anyone would have assumed the creatures were imaginary, arrogant or not.

    2. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 4, Informative

      There are actually two reasons why archeologists believed that the spotted horses were imaginary. The first is that in dogs a spotted coat is a result of the domestication process (as was demonstrated by a Russian researcher who bred foxes to produce a creature that had the same relationship to foxes that dogs have to wolves--simplification of the study). The second is that earlier studies of the DNA of horses from the time showed only black and brown coats.

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
    3. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by ZeroExistenZ · · Score: 1

      You never take an artistic rendering as a fact in science. See dinosaurs.

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      I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
    4. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by geekopus · · Score: 2

      GP is right though: The fact that there were drawings should have tipped them off that maybe their analysis was incomplete, rather than drawing the unwarranted conclusion of "Well, they must have just made them up".

      This is the scientific equivalent of those idiots that drive off of cliffs because of what their GPS tells them rather than what they see with their own two eyes.

    5. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by Kjella · · Score: 1

      How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this

      I think you're the arrogant one thinking everything they did was to be some kind of accurate historical record. Lots of modern day humans draw mythological or other fictional creatures too, maybe someone told a tall tale and a shaman decided to paint it on a cave wall. It would be foolish to take it all as fact.

      When you look at what many of the "scientifically-minded" believed in the 19th and early 20th century like phrenology, eugenics, "the noble savage" and a host of other things it is downright shocking that any remotely history-literate person can be so arrogant.

      What's funny to me is that we've bred wolves to dogs, yet deny that humans can be bred. It might not be a society that we want, but it's no myth that through directed reproduction we could change humanity. And that perhaps there are genetic variations on the inside too, clearly you can see them in size and appearance so why not in intelligence, disposition and so on? Surely nobody denies it in dogs, yet humans are all exactly the same except for individual variations? Sane with gender, you can have gender equality but don't tell me men and women are the same. Despite all the attempts to rewrite reality it turns out men and women make different choices and want different things and it's systematic. It's just gotten very politically incorrect to say anything but that we're all perfectly identical and there's absolutely no linking any trait to any particular ethnic group.

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    6. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by dogmatixpsych · · Score: 2

      I know this is a little off-topic but phrenology was founded in good science. It's basic ideas play a large role in how we view the brain today. What happened was that the science of phrenology was popularized (essentially politicized), losing its soundness (for the day) and credibility in the process (think pop psychology shows on T.V.). Phrenology gets a bad wrap because it was misused and abused. Since Gall didn't have any lovely MRI machines at his disposal, he did what he could - try to localize cognition, emotion, and mental functions based on what he could measure - the skull. His ideas helped pave the way for a radical shift in our understanding of the relationships between brain and behavior. Yes, there are ideas of phrenology that seem quaint when looking back from today but Gall helped lead to a paradigm shift in our understanding of the brain. I'm not saying all his methods were sound - there were some serious flaws, but most of the problems stemmed from people misusing his work.

    7. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 1

      Depending on how they approached it, concluding that the spotted horses were fantasy could be good science.
      However, archeology has done this in a manner that suggests those who go into archeology are too quick to conclude that ancient recorders (whether in writing or in art) of history were fantasists of the first order. In the 1800s, archeologists believed that Biblical references to the Assyrians were made up and that the Assyrians never existed because there were no references to the Assyrians in the records from Egypt and other parts of the Middle East that had been recovered at that time. It turns out that when they did finally discover records of the Assyrians that the Biblical accounts were fairly accurate and that the other civilizations contemporary with them hated them so much that they attempted to eliminate all reference to the Assyrians after the fall of Assyria.
      There are several other examples of where archeologists dismissed ancient records of something as fantasy because they did not have independent corroboration, only to later have to admit that the records were accurate (at least by the standards of the time the records were made).

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
    8. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by Nyder · · Score: 1

      how much many modern people assume our primitive ancestors were total morons who had more in common with a screaming chimp than modern humans in their ability to grasp what they saw happening around them. How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something....

      Not sure, but all them religions seemed made up...

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      Be seeing you...
    9. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by PhysicsPhil · · Score: 1

      How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this instead of perhaps prizing the spotted horses as more aesthetically pleasing to their sensibilities?

      If paintings are all the evidence you need, then surely you find the drawings, painting and written Biblical references to the unicorn even more compelling? How about the extensive and ancient Chinese descriptions of the dragon? Absent other evidence that the spotted horse actually existed, it isn't unreasonable to discount the pictures as fantasy.

    10. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by clintp · · Score: 1

      You never take an artistic rendering as a fact in science. See dinosaurs.

      I'd take a Audubon rendition of a bird to be a reasonable description of a specimen of a species. Not science, but a reliable factual eyewitness account.

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    11. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by Nemo137 · · Score: 1

      Because the influence of cultural systems on humans is greater than the influence of genetics. So any potential variations are swamped by by cultural variations, as seen by, oh, the entire goddamn sweep of human history.

    12. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      how much many modern people assume our primitive ancestors were total morons who had more in common with a screaming chimp than modern humans in their ability to grasp what they saw happening around them. How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this instead of perhaps prizing the spotted horses as more aesthetically pleasing to their sensibilities?

      When you look at what many of the "scientifically-minded" believed in the 19th and early 20th century like phrenology, eugenics, "the noble savage" and a host of other things it is downright shocking that any remotely history-literate person can be so arrogant.

      This is common a approach to archeology these days. If you did, you'll find there are conflicts even between archeologists and Egyptologists. There are common cases where oral traditions lay out a history, which if fully backed by artifacts and even written history which conflict with popular timelines so all the facts are literally ignored and a new timeline is completely invited. The completely falsified timeline is then published and that's what is commonly taught. Interestingly enough, most all the facts directly conflict with most major timelines and yet they all, completely independently, point back in time to roughly 9-12 thousand years ago. Modern archeology is definitely a pseudo-science and will remain as such until new theories and discoveries are allowed to be viewed and discussed without destroying the career of any who dare buck the system. Modern archeology is a joke and is built atop one bold face lie after another, time and time again.

    13. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by Shatrat · · Score: 1

      screaming chimp than modern humans in their ability to grasp what they saw happening around them

      Maybe we just assume this of artists, ancestral or otherwise?

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    14. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by adavies42 · · Score: 1

      I think with archaeologists, there was (and probably still is) a lingering hangover from the Middle Ages that severely warped their ability to value "traditional" sources (the Bible, classical mythology, etc.) seriously. Too many people wanted too strongly to prove they weren't taking "silly old myths" seriously....

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      -kfg
    15. Re:It never ceases to amaze me... by dogmatixpsych · · Score: 1

      Argh, "its" not "it's".

  9. Cavemen are not dumb. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It is interesting how we like to see Cavemen as dumb unsophisticated creatures. They were just as smart if not smarter then us today. The key difference was they didn't discover a lot of technology we take advantage of. How many of us will know to find metal ore. If you did find it how many would be using it in a fire hot enough to melt it.. Still after you melted it and find ways of molding it. You will probably be only using for jewelry, until you figure out more of its properties. A lot of these early discoveries were just random luck. And it could take a few generations before these random chances clicked.
     

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    1. Re:Cavemen are not dumb. by ZeroExistenZ · · Score: 1, Interesting

      They were just as smart if not smarter then us today. The key difference was they didn't discover a lot of technology we take advantage of.

      That "discovery" is part of our historic background and social evolution. We have have rediscovered the knowledge stored in the East (they transcribed the Greek wisdom and had mathematics and astronomy) with the crusades giving us "Enlightenment" and later making knowledge accessible. The desire to make knowledge easily accessible produced the bookpress. Without the ability to write, all that had no purpose or maybe some people going around singing about.

      Also, don't judge a fish's intelligence by its ability to mount a mountain; Cavemen knew how to operate in a world that we cannot even phantom, not by choice but by necessity. But we operate in a world a cavemen wouldn't be able to comprehend either, and we use our tools by necessity to come to a simular result (we live, eat and play).

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    2. Re:Cavemen are not dumb. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Depends on the cave man.

      We tend to forget that prehistory goes back a VERY long way. 5,000 years ago may seem like a long time to us, but if you drew a to-scale timeline of human existence from the earliest homo-sapiens to the present, these prehistoric painters would be considered ultra modern. Civilization itself would be such a recent invention that you would say it's too early to tell whether it's going to stay around a while, or if it's just a fad.

      And that's not even taking into consideration other earlier human species. Homo sapiens? Oh, they're that popular group that happen to be the "in" crowd right now. It's amazing what they've accomplished in just a couple hundred thousand years, but I wouldn't bet on them sticking around for very long. Give it another couple hundred thousand and I'll bet no one even remembers them.

      So yes, the cave men of 5,000 years ago were probably just as smart as we are. Take a cave man infant from that time, put him in a time machine and bring him forward to present time, put him in a modern school system, and he'll end up just like anyone else around him.

      But get your cave man from a couple of million years ago and you probably won't get the same results.

    3. Re:Cavemen are not dumb. by DriedClexler · · Score: 1

      How many of us will know to find metal ore

      Everyone, if the challenge was to go back to the caveman days and find metal ore, when it was practically on the surface, and no one had exploited the "low hanging fruit" yet.

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    4. Re:Cavemen are not dumb. by ticker47 · · Score: 1

      I agree, I've seen the Geico commercials and cavemen enjoy many of the same activities that we do.

    5. Re:Cavemen are not dumb. by NiteShaed · · Score: 1

      Cavemen knew how to operate in a world that we cannot even phantom, not by choice but by necessity.

      It's true. The average Slashdotter wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance in their environment.

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  10. Appaloosas rule! by John+Hasler · · Score: 1

    Knabstrups are ok too.

    The best horse I ever owned was an Appaloosa. He died two years ago at the age of 36. Good old Snout.

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  11. Re:Wait a moment... by BGil · · Score: 1

    And also : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanorhinus

  12. Darwin by Yev000 · · Score: 1

    Surely we need a Darwin icon here, not Einstein... Unless of course the horses were the result of some nuclear testing done by time travellers from the 24th century.