Research shows Stone Age horses were mottled

Nov 7, 2011, 20:01 GMT

Berlin - Stone Age cave paintings of horses with mottled coats turn out to be quite accurate: many Stone Age horses had a genetic mutation that gave them a leopard-style coat, scientists in Germany have discovered.

The Leibniz Zoological Institute in Berlin studied fossil remains of 31 ancient horses and discovered six had the mutation, which is still found in breeds such as the Knabstrupper and the Appaloosa.

The findings were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in the United States.

The geneticists said the mutation was only present in horses that lived in eastern and the main part of western Europe, but not in fossils from Siberia and the Iberian peninsula.

The finding matches evidence from prehistoric paintings made 25,000 years ago in the Pech-Merle caves in southwestern France. The cave artists depicted black, brown and spotted horses, and the DNA shows those are likely to have been the actual colours at the time.

Previously, experts had thought that mottled colours in horse coats arose in the course of domestication and breeding.