Not a joke (cf. “Russia is the homeland of the elephants,” which refers to the Soviet government’s habit of claiming that all great things came from Russia); from the National Geographic (Rebecca Dzombak):
Because people in the Volga-Don region bred horses for domestication and quickly began migrating to new places with them, this new line of horses soon spread from western Europe to eastern Asia and beyond.
The migration “was almost overnight,” says [molecular archaeologist Ludovic] Orlando, whose study was published on October 20 in Nature. “This was not something that built up over thousands of years.”
“As they expanded, they replaced all the previous lineages that were roaming around Eurasia,” he says. The domestic horse we know today “is the winner, the one we see everywhere, and the other types are sort of the losers.”
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