Authors
Ludovic Orlando, Aurélien Ginolhac, Guojie Zhang, Duane Froese, Anders Albrechtsen, Mathias Stiller, Mikkel Schubert, Enrico Cappellini, Bent Petersen, Ida Moltke, Philip LF Johnson, Matteo Fumagalli, Julia T Vilstrup, Maanasa Raghavan, Thorfinn Korneliussen, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Josef Vogt, Damian Szklarczyk, Christian D Kelstrup, Jakob Vinther, Andrei Dolocan, Jesper Stenderup, Amhed MV Velazquez, James Cahill, Morten Rasmussen, Xiaoli Wang, Jiumeng Min, Grant D Zazula, Andaine Seguin-Orlando, Cecilie Mortensen, Kim Magnussen, John F Thompson, Jacobo Weinstock, Kristian Gregersen, Knut H Røed, Véra Eisenmann, Carl J Rubin, Donald C Miller, Douglas F Antczak, Mads F Bertelsen, Søren Brunak, Khaled AS Al-Rasheid, Oliver Ryder, Leif Andersson, John Mundy, Anders Krogh, M Thomas P Gilbert, Kurt Kjær, Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten, Lars Juhl Jensen, Jesper V Olsen, Michael Hofreiter, Rasmus Nielsen, Beth Shapiro, Jun Wang, Eske Willerslev
Publication date
2013/7/4
Journal
Nature
Volume
499
Issue
7456
Pages
74-78
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group UK
Description
The rich fossil record of equids has made them a model for evolutionary processes. Here we present a 1.12-times coverage draft genome from a horse bone recovered from permafrost dated to approximately 560–780 thousand years before present (kyr bp),. Our data represent the oldest full genome sequence determined so far by almost an order of magnitude. For comparison, we sequenced the genome of a Late Pleistocene horse (43 kyr bp), and modern genomes of five domestic horse breeds (Equus ferus caballus), a Przewalski’s horse (E. f. przewalskii) and a donkey (E. asinus). Our analyses suggest that the Equus lineage giving rise to all contemporary horses, zebras and donkeys originated 4.0–4.5 million years before present (Myr bp), twice the conventionally accepted time to the most recent common ancestor of the genus Equus,. We also find that horse population size fluctuated multiple times over the …
Total citations
Scholar articles
L Orlando, A Ginolhac, G Zhang, D Froese… - Nature, 2013