About midway along the East Coast of the US , where Delaware meets Maryland and Virginia , there ’s a midget island call Assateague . No humans live there – itused to be hometo a tiny hamlet of no more than around 200 people , but that ’s long abandon now .
Even if you wanted to move to Assateague , it probably would n’t be a good idea : the island ’s shape and even its stance in the ocean areconstantly in flux , and storms seem todestroy any infrastructurepeople essay to work up . In fact , the most notable permanent residents on Assateague are the wild horses .
“ Assateague ’s wild horses are well known , even to many people who have never been to the island , ” notes theNational Park Service(NPS ) . But despite their popularity , one thing has always remained mysterious : where did they come from ? It ’s a question nobody has ever been able-bodied to definitively answer – until now .
“ It was a serendipitous determination , ” say Nicolas Delsol , a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural chronicle and top writer of a new newspaper , bring out today in the journalPLOS ONE , which points the finger squarely at early Spanish explorers as the likely reservoir of the sawbuck population .
befittingly , Delsol was primitively inquire a very different doubt to the one he terminate up answering . “ I was sequence mitochondrial DNA from fossil moo-cow teeth for my PhD , ” he explained .
“ [ I ] realize something was very different with one of the specimens when I analyzed the episode . ”
unlike is correct : it was another specie entirely . The tooth was originally the molar of an adult horse that live more than 400 year ago in Puerto Real – an early sixteenth - C town in what is now Haiti .
“ Puerto Real … served for decades as the last port of call for ships sail from the Caribbean , ” explain the research worker . “ But rearing piracy and the upgrade of illegal trade in the sixteenth century forced the Spanish to consolidate their power elsewhere on the island , and in 1578 , resident were prescribe to evacuate [ . ] ”
“ The abandon town was destroyed the following class by Spanish officials , ” they supply .
It claim 400 years for the site to be rediscover , but since then there have been many archaeologic finds from what was once Puerto Real . Most , though , had nothing to do with horses : “ of the over 127,000 vertebrate specimens identified from Puerto Real thus far , only 8 were attributed to horse when this study start , ” the paper short letter .
So sequence the tooth ’s genome was already an exciting prospect : it ’s the oldest DNA ever obtain from a domesticate horse in the Americas . But it was when Delsol compared the specimen to the DNA of innovative horses that the real surprise came .
“ The specimen that present the near affinities with the Puerto Real horse is an individual belonging to the Chincoteague pony breed , ” the report read , referring to the wild horses of Assateague .
And that ’s rather exciting : it ties quite nicely with one of the main origin myth of the equid population .
“ The descent of the Chincoteague ponies is popularize by a local oral history restate in the mid-20th century children ’s novelMisty of Chincoteague , ” the paper bank bill . “ According to this account , Chincoteague ponies condescend from a diminished herd of horses that escaped the wreck of a Spanish galleon during the compound epoch . ”
“ The galleon is say to have set canvas from the Caribbean but was caught in a storm and shipwrecked near to [ Assateague ’s neighbor ] Chincoteague Island . ”
Not everyone has accepted this estimate . “ [ The ] dramatic tale of battle and survival is popular , ” read NPS , but “ there are no records yet that sustain it . ”
“ The most plausible explanation is that they are the descendants of horses that were get to roadblock islands like Assateague in the late 17th C by mainland owners to deflect fencing laws and tax revenue of livestock , ” the Service says .
But “ early colonial literature is often patchy , and … just because they do n’t remark the horses does n’t mean they were n’t there , ” indicate Delsol . And the new study lends potent grounds to the Spanish story : accord to genome sequencing , the Puerto Real horse belongs to the equine haplogroup A , a enatic branch commonly found in Central Asia and Southern Europe . Most importantly , this type of knight has been find in Spain since the Bronze Age – and so the Puerto Real horse can be seen as something of a “ absent link ” between Spanish horses and their Assateague cousins .
While the research worker acknowledge their conclusion rests on a exclusive mitochondrial genome , they argue that the issue are nevertheless significant for many reasons . “ Our written report highlights how ancient DNA can help us understand cultural and historic processes , ” they write , “ not only in the remote past but also in understudied episode of more late history . ”
“ The analysis of the origination of European domesticates ( for instance the horse ) in the Americas is such a fascinating yet understudied topic , ” they note . “ Our results plump for the Iberian origins of these animals but they also highlight another narrative : the exploration of the mid - Atlantic coast by the Spanish early during the compound period . ”
