DonDon’t C’t Call Me Tall Me TarpanarpanHHoow Ew Eururopean wopean wild horild horses frses from the last glacial perom the last glacial period, their liiod, their livvingingand eand extinct rxtinct relatielativves, and 20th ces, and 20th centurentury bacy back-brk-breeds all ended upeeds all ended upbeing cbeing called the same thing and walled the same thing and what is rhat is realleally behind that namey behind that nameWritten by Andrea Castell i in November 2010Text last updated on March 3, 2012First published on Scribd on March 21, 2013Read more at http://longwinters.net76.net/

WWEE DON’TDON’T KNOKNOWW HOHOWW MMAANYNY SPSPECIECIESES or subspeciesof wild horses lived in Europe and Asia when earlydomestication attempts began, but we do know thatonly one of them escaped or resisted domestication,survived captivity, and is still living in the wild today:Przewalski horses (Equus ferus przewalskii), alsoknown as Mongolian or Asian wild horses.

We also don’t know how many species orsubspecies were domesticated. Many authors thinkthat Przewalski horses were not among them, andpoint instead to an extinct subspecies of Europeanwild horse (Equus ferus ferus) of which the horsesknown as tarpans may have been the last survivingpopulation. This may explain why the word “tarpan”is widely used today as a synonym for wild horse,but where did the tarpans really come from?

There are two views on this, as found in theexisting literature. According to the first view, thehorses known as tarpans were the directdescendants of a wild population from Pleistocenetimes, regardless of how much they later mixed, orwere mixed, with domestic or feral horses, whereasthe second view holds that they were nothing morethan feral horses, no matter how ancient. From thepages of Mammal Species of the World, Grubb(2005) reminds us that material evidence that thetarpan was a wild horse, and one distinct from thePrzewalski horse, “is limited to osteological materialof two specimens and it has not been reliablyidentified with Pleistocene or Holocene localpopulations,” so it is not surprising that “its statusas a wild rather than a feral form is disputed.” Thisis how Kowalski (1967) summed up what we knowabout wild horses in Europe and Asia:

In the open areas of the late Pleistocene, the wild horsewas very common and was a principal prey of

Paleolithic hunters. In the postglacial, the range of thewild horse contracted, beginning with western Europe,and … now lives only in the semideserts of Central Asia…. Historical data prove the existence of wild horsesin the Ukrainian steppes as late as the middle of thenineteenth century. These horses were described as aseparate species … but they were more probably feral…. The postglacial development of forests made theexistence of the wild horse in western and centralEurope impossible, and the final limitation of its areato the semideserts of central Asia was the result ofpredation by man.

The “historical data” referred to above are a seriesof references from the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies where the tarpan was described as “a smallanimal, having a mouse-dun coat with a lightunderbelly, sooty to black limbs from the knees andhocks down, a short, frizzled mane, and a tail withshort dock hair.” This brief summary was given byOlsen (2006) who then remarked:

In fact, in most features the tarpan was very similar inappearance to the Przewalski horse, except that the coatwas grayer and apparently turned very light in thewinter.

The similarity evoked in this remark may be takenas evidence that the tarpan was indeed a wild horse,but may also suggest a third possible answer to thequestion of where the tarpans came from. The keypoint is that the coat of Przewalski horses can alsoturn lighter in winter, although this seasonalcharacter is rarely mentioned in the literature(Groves pers. comm.) maybe because it has onlybeen observed in some variants. What this leaves uswith is only the summer coat color difference, so Iwonder if in some of the early sightings the witnessactually saw Przewalski horses instead? Yet anotherpossibility is that the tarpans were a population of

Przewalski horses that, at the western end of theirrange, had mixed with domestic or feral horses. Forexample, genetic studies suggest that interbreedingmay have occurred in the past between Przewalskihorse males and domestic females (Lau et al. 2009),and if this was the case than such a pattern was neverlost because that is the reason why tarpans wereultimately hunted to extinction (Bököny 1974).

Even if their status was uncertain, as many as threeattempts to “breed back” the tarpans took place aftertheir disappearance. In Poland, Vetulani usedselected local domestic horses, among which mayhave lived the descendants of the last free-living“forest tarpans.” The type of horses he selected andbred he called “Konik,” Polish for “little horse,” andthe same name is still used today. In Germany, theHeck brothers used Przewalski horses and fourdomestic breeds, including Koniks, and their resultis known as Heck horse (Bunzel-Drüke 2001). Thecontribution from Koniks, however significant, isclearly not enough to make Heck horses the sameas the vanished “tarpans”, and yet this is how theyhave since been known in Germany, as well as inNorth America where a few of them were importedbeginning in the 1950s. In the 1960s, in centralOregon, Harry Hegardt began a new backbreedingprogram using wild mustangs from the Americanwest, which are likely to descend from the horsesof the Spanish conquistadores, which in turn mayhave been closely related to the tarpan. However,even this connection would hardly make Hegardthorses—however unique and fascinating theirstory—the same as “tarpans,” as they were describedin the press.

A view of the primeval forest in Bialowieza NationalPark, Poland, where the horses known as tarpans werelast seen between the late 18th and early 19th century.Photo © iStock/Aleksander Bolbot

Whether the horses known as tarpans were trulywild, a mix of wild and feral horses, or a line ofPrzewalski horses mixed with domestic or feralhorses, we should call “tarpan” only the real ones,the horses that were seen in the forests and steppesof central and eastern Europe until the end of the19th century without assuming that they had beenliving in the wild, in the same region, since the endof the last glaciation.✶

NONOTTEE: For scientific names, I have followed Groves(1994) who recognized three subspecies, the twogiven in parentheses above plus an unnamed“Swedish form.”

AACKNOCKNOWWLLEDGMENEDGMENTTSS

The author would like to thank prof. Colin Grovesfrom Australian National University for kindlysharing his knowledge of Przewalski horses.

REFERENCESREFERENCES

Bököny, S. 1974. History of Domestic Mammals in Centraland Eastern Europe. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest.

Bunzel-Drüke, M. 2001. Ecological Substitutes for WildHorse (Equus ferus Boddaert, 1785 = E. przewalskiiPoljakov, 1881) and Aurochs (Bos primigenius Bojanus,1827), pp. 240–252 in Gerken, B., and Görner, M.(Eds.), Landscape Development with Large Herbivores:New Models and Practical Experiences. Natur- undKulturlandschaft 4. Paderborn University, Höxter.

Groves, C. P. 1994. Morphology, Habitat and Taxonomy,pp. 39–59 in Boyd, L. and Houpt, K. A. (Eds.) Przewal-ski’s Horse: The History and Biology of an EndangeredSpecies. SUNY Press, Albany, NY.

Grubb, P. 2005. Equus caballus, pp. 630–631 in Wilson,D. E. and Reeder, D. M. (Eds.), Mammal Species of theWorld: A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference, 3rd ed.,Vol. 1. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Kowalski, K. 1967. The Pleistocene extinction of mammalsin Europe, pp. 349–365 in Martin, P. and Wright, S.(Eds.), Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause.Yale University Press, New Haven.

Lau, A. N., Peng, L., Goto, H., Chemnick, L., Ryder, O. A.,and Makova, K. D. 2009. Horse Domestication andConservation Genetics of Przewalski’s Horse Inferredfrom Sex Chromosomal and Autosomal Sequences.Molecular Biology and Evolution 26(1): 199–208.

Olsen, S. L. 2006. Early horse domestication on theEurasian steppe, pp. 245–269 in Zeder, M. A. et al.(Eds.), Documenting Domestication: New Genetic andArchaeological Paradigms. University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley.