Arabian horses race in the Liwa International Festival, Abu Dhabi KARIM SAHIB/AFP via Getty Images
Ludovic Orlando (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan), Princeton University Press
It is in the epilogue of his latest book that equine geneticist Ludovic Orlando delivers one of his biggest take-home messages: “[T]he horse,” he writes, “remains what it has been for almost our entire history, a vector for bringing people together.”
It is both a beautiful statement and a major theme in Horses: A 4000-year genetic journey across the world. In this translation from the French, we see how human civilisation evolved alongside the domesticated horse. With Orlando, we follow a scientific journey that explains the mysteries of this impressive, influential animal across its 4200 years beside humans.
But the statement in reverse – as Orlando’s text reveals – is true as well: humans, across history, have also brought horses together.
When our ancestors first fenced in, milked, harnessed, drove and eventually rode horses more than four millennia ago, they became unwitting masters of genetics, mixing and matching individuals in ways that would produce chariot horses, racehorses, desert endurance horses, plough horses, war mounts and today’s leisure-riding ponies. We know this not only from the hundreds of specialised breeds alive today, but, more deeply, through their DNA.
That’s where Orlando’s brilliance shines. Over the past decade, his sequencing work has overturned so much of what the world thought it knew about horses: domestication, where it happened and how horses evolved afterwards – and even how horse lineages stretched back tens of millions of years. This is all told with vivid detail and captivating storytelling, built on mysteries teased apart through unravelled double helixes.
I interviewed Orlando nearly 13 years ago, early in his career, just after he and his colleagues had sequenced the DNA from a 700,000-year-old fossilised horse bone found in Thistle Creek in the Canadian Yukon – then the oldest fully sequenced genome of any organism. At the time, Orlando was driven by the age of the specimen, not its species. Neither of us knew that he would become a leading authority on the horse genome.
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Orlando’s sequencing work has overturned so much of what the world thought it knew about horses
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Now, in this book, we follow him as he traces clues across millennia, cultures and continents in search of the true history of humanity’s other best friend. Ancient DNA from bones and hair forms the foundation, but he fits the findings into broader frameworks from archaeology, ancient art, historical texts, even linguistics – tracking when and where horse-related words emerged.
Each chapter opens with rich anecdotes that spill into enthralling myth-busting. Medieval warhorses weren’t the giants we imagined. Mustangs racing across the Western plains of the US aren’t native to North America, but are descendants of horses brought from Europe after the 15th century. Przewalski’s horses aren’t truly wild, but are descendants of an early, abandoned domestication attempt. And those spectacular Arabian horses – think elegant white steeds in Bedouin tents – aren’t the foundation of all fine riding horses worldwide.
In fact – spoiler alert – save for the Przewalski, every horse today comes from a single domestication event 4200 years ago in what is now south-west Russia, as Orlando’s comparisons of ancient and modern genomes reveal.
In page after page, he shows us the limitations of what we thought we knew – and how genomic sequencing has added nuance to that picture. Readers meet communities on the Asian steppes and Indigenous people in the US, and study artefacts alongside scientists, in the service of understanding how horse and human came together – and how that reshaped the world.
While it’s a wild ride, horse-savvy readers may stumble over small slips in language – such as describing ancient DNA linked to spotted horses as “dappling” or calling Thoroughbreds racing in Kentucky or Melbourne “English”.
Still, Horses is a thundering read, reminding us that the long, tangled history of humans and horses isn’t just written in bones and genomes, but also in the enduring ways we continue to shape one another.
Christa Lesté-Lasserre is a science journalist specialising in animal health and behaviour based in Greater Paris
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