Seeing spots
For as long as people have depicted horses in art, we’ve been showing them with spots.
For as long as people have depicted horses in art, we’ve been showing them with spots.
Beginning years near what ago, about is people now 29,000 Pech living Merle, France, walked deep into a cave and painted their world on the walls. Together with numerous handprints, they created more than 800 distinct images, including mammoths, bison, aurochs, a bear---and horses drawn with dark outlines filled in with numerous round black spots, similar to the leopard-spotted horses we see today.
For a long time, scholars speculated about the spotted horses of Pech Merle. Ice Age humans painted many horses---1,250 have been documented in caves from Spain into eastern Russia ---but all others where coat colors can be identified are black, brown, bay, grullo or dun. Indeed, in this time before domestication, it was believed, these were the only equine coat colors that existed. With the assumption that the Pech Merle artists could not have seen real leopard-spotted horses, explanations for their paintings ranged from hallucinations to artistic license.
In 2011, however, Stanford University researchers offered another possibility: The artists may have been simply painting what they saw. Their genetic analysis showed that four of 10 horses they sampled from Pleistocene Europe carried the LP gene, while none of the six Siberian samples from the same period had it. LP is the leopard complex gene, which can produce leopard spotting, white blankets with spotting, and other color patterns we now associate mainly with Appaloosas and a few other breeds.
Headlines in the popular press in November 2011 made declarations like, “Spotted Horses in Cave Art Weren’t Just a Figment, DNA Shows” (The New York Times) and “Cave Paintings
Showed True Colors of Stone Age Horses” (Science Now). But did they?
Not necessarily, says Phillip Sponenberg, DVM, PhD, of the Virginia–Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine and author of Equine Color Genetics. “Even though LP existed, the other question is how fully it was expressed,” he says. “Many LP horses only minimally express spotting, so basically they are not all that spotted. Further research might shed light on the modifiers that help to more fully express the spotting.”
French archaeologist Jean Clottes noted that the Pech Merle artists painted spots both inside and outside the outlines of their horses, “giving them a meaning or role other than
purely descriptive,” he told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
We may never understand the inspiration behind the spotted horses of Pech Merle. “It depends on what was going through the artist’s mind, and that’s tough to figure out,” says Sponenberg. “So, while it could be that such spotted horses were out there, it equally could be artistic license.”
One thing is certain: For as long as people have known horses, we’ve been drawing and painting them with spots.
Reference: “Genotypes of predomestic horses match phenotypes painted in Paleolithic works of cave art,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2011