The Kunga Is The Oldest Hybrid Bred By Humans

4,500 years ago, a mysterious hybrid equine was likely for used for warfare

The kunga is an equine hybrid identified first in the early 2000’s from a site called Umm el-Marra in northern Syria. This site dated back to 2,600 B.C. The remains of these skeletons closely resemble horse-like animals that are represented in some Sumerian artifacts. A new paper in Science analyzed the kunga’s genome¹.

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 Syria. © GLENN SCHWARTZ/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

They compared the genome of the kunga to that of horses, donkeys and also hemippe. They were able to identify the kunga derived from a female donkey and a male hemippe about 4,500 years ago. This makes the kunga the oldest evidence of a human created hybrid. Using a similar comparative genetic technique, this group also identified another ancient mule from 1,000 B.C.², which makes that specimen the next oldest human created hybrid known to date.

Senior author, Eva-Maria Geigl suspects they were created for warfare. As we all know, getting a donkey to do anything is next to impossible. And since no wild-asses could be tamed, this hybrid likely had characteristic that were sought by ancient Sumerians to pull carts as depicted below.

This mosaic scene on a Sumerian artifact, a wooden box dubbed the Standard of Ur that depicts war scenes, includes images of hybrid kungas pulling wagons. AGEFOTOSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The curiosity is that the zoo archaeological evidence of the last hemippe is at least a century older than the first kunga. And since horses came to the region much later³, just how the kunga was bred is a mystery currently.

1. Bennett, E. A., Weber, J., Bendhafer, W., Champlot, S., Peters, J., Schwartz, G. M., Grange, T., & Geigl, E.-M. (2022). The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia. Science Advances, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abm0218

2. Guimaraes, S., Arbuckle, B. S., Peters, J., Adcock, S. E., Buitenhuis, H., Chazin, H., Manaseryan, N., Uerpmann, H.-P., Grange, T., & Geigl, E.-M. (2020). Ancient DNA shows domestic horses were introduced in the southern Caucasus and Anatolia during the Bronze Age. Science Advances, 6(38), eabb0030. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb0030

3. Librado, P., Khan, N., Fages, A. et al. The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes. Nature 598, 634–640 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04018-9