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(Berlin/Wolfgang Ruppert/Art resource, NY)
Genetic material from the bones
and teeth of wild horses, some
of which died more than
20,000 years ago, has answered a longstanding
debate about some Paleolithic
cave artists: Were these ancient painters
realists, depicting the natural world they
saw around them, or did they portray
more imaginative representations?
One of the paintings in question, The
Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle, in a cave in
southern France, is a nearly 25,000-yearold
depiction of horses with spotted
coats. While spots are seen in many
modern horses, they were believed to
be a product of later domestication
and thus would not have coexisted with
humans in the Paleolithic.
That belief turned out to be wrong.
An international team of scientists
examined ancient DNA from predomesticated
horse remains found in
Europe and Siberia. The team found
gene variants common to domesticated
spotted horses in more than 20 percent
of their samples. Though the finding
doesn't rule out some ancient creative
license, the artists could have seen spotted
horses in the wild. In Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, the
researchers report, "At least for wild
horses, Paleolithic cave paintings were
closely rooted in the real-life appearance
of the animals."
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