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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."

12 of 87 comments (clear)

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

    We (in Europe) prefer to call them cows.

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

      He must.

      Slashdot has been doing +1 before numbers were invented.

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  2. 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?

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  3. 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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  4. Spotted by jimshatt · · Score: 2

    So these cavemen were horse-spotters! Bwahahaha.

  5. 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

  6. 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.

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    3. 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.

    4. 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. 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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