HEAS Seminar Series – Archaeological Science

The genomic history of the domestic horse

The HEAS Seminar series on Archaeological Science continues with a talk by Ludovic Orlando on The genomic history of the domestic horse.

The horse is one of the last mega-herbivores to have been domesticated but certainly represents the one that most impacted human history. It provided past societies with fast mobility, new ways to make war, and facilitated pastoralism and farming. The history of the domestic horse, from the early stages more than 4000 years ago, to the modern breeding of racing champions, remained poorly understood. In the last few years, the sequencing of extensive genome time-series for horses has helped write entirely new chapters about their domestication history. It revealed their original homeland in the steppes of the lower Don-Volga, rewrote the evolutionary origins of the now extinct-in-the-wild Przewalski’s horses and tracked the geographic and temporal spread of some of the key selective breeding targets for traits such as high-stature, speed and more. This seminar will present how my group harnessed the latest methodological advances in ancient DNA research to gain new understanding of the process and history underlying horse domestication.

This talk will take place online and in-person on Monday the 17th April at 10:30 in Seminar Room 5.1 of the University of Vienna Biology Building, Vienna.

To register for both online and in-person participation, please click here