In ancient Mesopotamia, the first bioengineered hybrid animals were discovered.

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In a royal burial, archaeologists unearthed the remains of "kungas."

For at least 500 years before the domestication of horses, the Mesopotamians were employing donkeys and wild asses to pull their war chariots, according to new research.

Ancient DNA research of animal bones found in northern Syria has answered a long-standing mystery about the "kungas," or war wagon-pulling animals, mentioned in ancient literature.

Equids (horses-like creatures) are known to be extinct in the Middle East. Still, this study found that their skeletons did not meet the measurements of donkeys or Syrian wild asses, according to study co-author Eva Geigl, a genomicist in Paris. "So they were somewhat different, but it wasn't clear what the difference was," he continued.

It was previously thought that donkeys and Syrian wild asses (hemiones) were separate species, but a new study demonstrates that they are hybrids.

Kungas have been described in ancient documents as highly desired and expensive beasts, which could be attributed to the difficulty of producing them, Geigl believes.

It was necessary to breed domesticated donkeys with wild asses because the kungas were all sterile, similar to many hybrid animals like mules.

She said that wild asses could run faster than donkeys and even kungas, and they were impossible to tame.

By "bio-engineering," Geigl explained to Live Science. Because they had to do it for every kunga produced, so these early hybrids were extraordinarily valuable.

Donkeys of war

Many ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform documents mention the Kungas, and the renowned "Standard of Ur," a Sumerian mosaic from around 4,500 years ago that is currently on exhibit at the British Museum in London, depicts them hauling four-wheeled war carts.

Geigl said archaeologists had suspected they were a hybrid donkey, but they had no idea with which equid it had been crossed before.

According to her, some scientists thought Syrian wild asses were too small to produce kungas.

One of the world's oldest zoos, the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna, Austria, housed the last wild Syrian ass in 1927; its remains are currently housed at the city's natural history museum.

Using data from ancient bones found in what is now southeastern Turkey, the researchers in this new study looked at the genetic make-up of a wild ass that lived 11,000 years ago in Syria and Vienna.

According to Geigl, the comparison showed the two species to be related, but the ancient wild ass was significantly larger. This indicated that the Syrian wild ass population had shrunk considerably since antiquity, most likely due to human-caused pressures like hunting.

the historical civilization of Mesopotamia

Some historians believe that the Sumerians were among the first to domesticate kungas as far back as 2500 B.C., which would put them at least 500 years ahead of the Caucasus Steppe's initial introduction of domesticated horses.

A carved stone panel in the British Museum depicts two men leading a wild ass they had captured. It shows how the Assyrian successor nations to the Sumerians continued to raise and sell kungas for ages.

An ancient burial complex at Tell Umm El-Marra in northern Syria has been linked to the ancient Egyptian city of Tuba. The kunga bones used in the latest study originated from this burial complex, dated between 3000 and 2000 B.C.

A decade ago, University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Jill Weber and her team dug up the bones as part of their research. There were teeth marks from bit harnesses and wear patterns that indicated that the animals from Tell Umm el-Marra weren't just grazing like normal donkeys, Weber argued.

Because they could run faster than horses, so the use of kungas to draw war wagons is likely to have persisted even after the domestication of horses in Mesopotamia.

As a result, no more kungas were developed from donkeys and wild asses, maybe because domesticated horses were simpler to breed, Geigl believes.

The new research was published in the journal Science Advances on Friday (Jan. 14).

Reference : https://www.livescience.com/hybrid-kungas-discovered-mesopotamia

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/photos/gurun-bukit-pasir-kering-lanskap-1270345/

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