Horses domesticated more than 5,000 years ago

Dogs have always enjoyed wide acceptance as man's best friend, but a German team of scientists has revealed that horses may have been domesticated more than five millennia ago.

The latest in gene technology recently provided a team of Berlin-based researchers with clues as to when and where wild horses were first tamed: evidence suggests humans entered the picture at least 5,000 years ago on the Ponto-Caspian steppe in modern-day Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Romania.

This development completely altered and reshaped the history of mankind, explained Arne Ludwig of Berlin's Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW).

The team conducted its research, which recently appeared in the US journal Science, using the latest breakdowns of colour genes from very old DNA samples. Ludwig noted the process had been difficult due to the poor condition of the DNA, saying that of 152 bones available to test, only 89 could be successfully processed. Using the variability of the gene for fur colour in horses alive at the time, it could be proven that a large portion of the colours we know today had already been influenced by human horse breeders around 5,000 years ago. This disproved this theory that changes in fur colour occurred as a result of the breeding by humans just over the past few centuries.

Bones found from the last ice age "around 12,000 years ago" confirmed that horses only appeared in the colours brown and black at one time. But human influence sparked a sudden rapid onslaught of colours and mixtures.And the domestication of horses in turn led to decisive changes for mankind.

The Indo-Germanic languages could really only have migrated the way they did on the backs of horses, explained Ludwig.

It wasn't long before horses "which were usually tamed by farmers" began to influence commerce and even more notably, military strategy.

As pack, draught, and mount animals, horses were one of the fateful factors in the founding and destruction of entire kingdoms, the IZW researchers said. The horse armies of Alexander the Great and Ghengis Khan are the most famous examples of the impact of mankind's other four-legged friend.

IZW

Snowball, the cockatoo keeps the beat

The idea for a science experiment can come from an unusual place. After watching a YouTube video of a dancing bird named Snowball, a scientist in California decided to study the ability of animals to keep the beat. Bird lovers have long claimed that their pets have rhythm, and there are many videos of dancing birds online. Until now, scientists have suspected that humans are the only animals that can accurately keep rhythm with music. "Scientists have claimed that this capacity is uniquely human for several decades," says W. Tecumseh Fitch, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland.

Thanks to Snowball, that scientific opinion is changing. Snowball is a cockatoo, a kind of parrot, and his favourite song is "Everybody" by the Backstreet Boys. When he hears the song, he stomps his feet and sways his body with the tempo, or pace of the music, as though he is the only bird member of the boy band.

Aniruddh Patel is a neuroscientist, or a scientist who studies how the brain and the nervous system contribute to learning, seeing and other mental abilities. He works at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. After seeing Snowball's dance moves online, Patel visited the cockatoo at the bird rescue facility he's called home for two years. The scientist played "Everybody" for Snowball and also played versions of the song that were sped up or slowed down. Sometimes, Snowball danced too fast or too slowly. Often, when there was a change in tempo, Snowball adjusted his dancing to match the rhythm. In other experiments, scientists have observed the same abilities in pre-schoolchildren.Patel isn't the only scientist who has studied Snowball's moves. Adena Schachner, who studies psychology at Harvard University, also wanted to know more about the dancing bird. Schachner's team played different musical pieces for Snowball and a parrot named Alex, as well as eight human volunteers. The scientists observed that the birds and the humans kept time to the music with about the same accuracy.

Schachner and her team didn't stop with the birds. She and her colleagues watched thousands of YouTube videos of different animals moving to music.

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