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 ancie…