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Lack of support for adaptation of post-glacial horses to woodlands

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 2, pages 582–583 (2018)Cite this article

To the Editor — Recently, Sandoval-Castellanos et al.1 published an inspiring study that supports an adaptation to forests in wild horses (Equus ferus) during the mid-Holocene epoch (9,000–5,000 years ago (9–5 ka)) in Europe1. Sandoval-Castellanos et al.1 used a modelling approach for reconstructing the relative landscape openness in Europe on the basis of the percentage of arboreal plant functional types (European Pollen Database), as well as ecological niche modelling to infer co-occurrence patterns of wild horses and plants using faunal records of wild horses and pollen records of plant taxa. The results show an increasing presence of horses in post-glacial forests but no significant horse–plant co-occurrences. To evaluate the temporal change of coat colour genes in horses they analysed the agouti gene (ASIP) and the results show a selection of black phenotypes during the Holocene. Combined results were taken as evidence by the authors to support the hypothesis that horses adapted to woodlands.

However, our detailed analysis of faunal data from archaeological excavations (project ‘Climate–Landscape–Fauna–Man’) revealed that adaptation to primeval woodlands in the Central European Lowlands (CEL) is not supported by the subfossil vertebrate record.

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Fig. 1: Presence and frequencies of wild horse (E. ferus) remains in the vertebrate record of Mesolithic and Neolithic archaeological sites in the CEL 11.7–4 ka.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the German Research Foundation (DFG) for founding the project ‘Climate–Landscape–Fauna–Man’ (SO-861/2-1). We are grateful to A. Ludwig and colleagues for personal information and publishing inspiring results, stimulating the debate about the interactions of climate, humans, vegetation and megafauna in the European Holocene primeval landscape.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Zoology, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany

    Robert S. Sommer

  2. Department of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany

    Robert S. Sommer

  3. Institute for Natural Resource Conservation, University of Kiel, Kiel, Germany

    Charlotte Hegge

  4. Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig, Germany

    Ulrich Schmölcke

Authors
  1. Robert S. Sommer
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  2. Charlotte Hegge
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  3. Ulrich Schmölcke
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Contributions

R.S.S. and U.S. planned the project ‘Climate–Landscape–Fauna–Man’ and C.H. compiled the frequencies of megafauna species in archaeological sites in the frame of her PhD work. R.S.S. wrote the text and designed the figures. All authors contributed to the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Robert S. Sommer.

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Sommer, R.S., Hegge, C. & Schmölcke, U. Lack of support for adaptation of post-glacial horses to woodlands. Nat Ecol Evol 2, 582–583 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0491-9

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