Report by Swasti Sharma
The offspring produced by two animals of two different species is a hybrid animal breed (like – liger is the hybrid breed of lion and tiger).
There is a long list of hybrid animals. According to scientists at the John Hopkins University, the earliest hybrid animal breed was the Kunga.
The skeletons of Kungas were recently discovered in a princely burial in ancient Mesopotamia. Scientists used DNA material from the excavations to arrive at these conclusions.
Mesopotamians were using hybrids of domesticated donkeys and wild asses to pull their war wagons around 4500 years ago.
According to the skeletons, they looked like equine (horse like animals). However, they didn’t fit the measurement of donkeys and hemippe.
The ancient equine from Syro-Mesopotamia existed around 4500 years ago and it was a mixture of donkey and hemippe (a type of Asiatic wild ass).
The new study shows that kungas were strong, fast, and sterile hybrids of a female domestic donkey and a male Syrian wild ass or hemippe.
The animals, whose physical features didn’t match any known equine species, appear to be ‘kungas’.
Ancient records mentioned kungas as highly prized and very expensive beasts, which could be explained by the rather difficult process of breeding them.
This was because each kunga was sterile.
Like many hybrid animals such as mules, each Kunga had to be produced by a male wild ass, which had to be captured.
Historians think that the Sumerians (the members of the indigenous non-Semitic people of ancient Babylonia) were the first to breed Kungas – from 2500 B.C. to at least 500 years before the first domesticated horses were introduced from the steppe north of the Caucasus.
Kungas are mentioned in several ancient texts in cuneiform on clay tablets from Mesopotamia and they are portrayed drawing four-wheeled war wagons on the famous “Standard of Ur,” a Sumerian mosaic from about 4,500 years ago that’s now on display at the British Museum in London.
Image on Top: The excavated remains of the Kungas. Image Credit: Glenn Schwartz/John Hopkins University. Image Below: The Standard of Ur – One side. Image Credit: Wikipedia.
