If the Spotted Horse was real, then…
I actually hadn’t heard of the spotted horse before today.
The spotted horse exists as art found in a Spanish cave that is 25,000 years old – much older than the last global cataclysm, and predating the megafaunal extinction. It is easy to dismiss the dots as purely artistic stylings, but as we keep learning, ancient myths and images tend to be more literal than we expect.
…a small number of caves, including 25,000-year-old Pech Merle in southern France, feature horses painted white with black spots. Some archaeologists have argued that this leopard-like pattern was fanciful and symbol laden rather than realistic. Indeed, in a 2009 analysis of DNA from the bones of nearly 90 ancient horses dated from about 12,000 to 1000 years ago, researchers found genetic evidence for bay and black coat colors but no sign of the spotted variety, suggesting that the spotted horse could have been the figment of some artist’s imagination.
I’d be convinced, except they used the DNA of horses that survived the cataclysm.
Thankfully the team behind the original study decided to find older DNA and they hit the jackpot:
They found that 18 of the horses were bay, seven were black, but six had a genetic variant—called LP—that corresponds to leopard-like spotting in modern horses. Moreover, out of 10 Western European horses estimated to be about 14,000 years old, four had the LP genetic marker, suggesting that spotted horses were not uncommon during the heyday of cave painting.
All three color types appear in cave art, which means that they are accurate depictions of the horses of the day. The scientists have made the usual stabs at guessing why this breed of horses became extinct, but of course did not look at any catastrophic scenarios.
So, once more I am asking myself, were dragons and unicorns once real?
