Coat Colors and Domestication

Several months ago a friend of mine sent me a copy of a published scientific article titled, "Coat Color Variation at the Beginning of Horse Domestication," published April 24, 2009 in [i]Science[/i] magazine. [size=85] [color=#0080FF]Researchers/authors are affiliated with various institutes and universities in Germany, Spain, and USA (University of California Berkeley) ... involving zoologists, anthropologists, and biologists. If anyone requires it, I can type out the list of authors and which institutions or universities with which they are affiliated.[/color][/size] In this article they say there is evidence that horses were domesticated as early as 5,500 to 5,000 BP (before present ... before the year 0). And that coat color variations began to take place quite rapidly from that point in time ... with human selection being credited for that rapid change. Another friend pointed out to us at that time that breeders of fox noticed a rapid change in colors produced by the captive fox. Due to human selection in the breeding process, colors that would likely not have survived in the wild (hence were not seen in wild/free fox) were not uncommon in captive bred foxes. I think she said even parti-colored (think pinto) patterns were seen quite regularly. Using ancient samples (DNA from the remains of ancient horses), the researchers who authored of the above mentioned article were able to determine that the earliest ancient horses were all at least bay (EE AA) ... from around 12,000 BP, if I'm reading it correctly. Bear in mind that they could only test for colors for which there is currently a direct DNA test for that gene/mutation. In other words, they had no dun test available to them, for example, so they could not test for dun. They do state that there is evidence they were all bay dun, but that they couldn't test for dun. It was shortly after they believe horses to have first become domesticated (around 5,000 - 4,000 BP, I guess) that they first note both "A" and "a" present in early Iberian horses. So that's when black coat phenotype became possible ... that's when an "A" mutated to an "a"! Around the 2,000 BP-ish time frame (I'm not reading to get exact dates, just looking at a linear time line and paraphrasing), mutations for Tobiano, Sabino, and Chestnut showed up. And finally in the 1,000 BP time frame, Buckskin and Black Silver were noted. Obviously, for example, if buckskin and chestnut were possible, so was palomino and all other variants of cream dilution. They are simply reporting what the precise color test results were for the ancient DNA samples they had available to them. In other words, the samples they had just didn't happen to include a palomino. BTW, they had 152 samples, from which they were able to successfully color test 89. The others may not have had viable DNA, I guess. Thought some of you might find this interesting.