Talk:Exmoor pony/Archive 1

Celtic ponies?

I arrived here disambiguating Celtic but I'm not quite sure what is meant by a Celtic pony! For now I've disambiguated it to Celt, as it obviously means either the type of donkey brought by the celts or the type of donkey found at the same place and time as the celts. ~ Veledan • Talk ^{+ new} 21:06, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

The 'Celtic pony' is the name given to fossilised pony structures found in Alaska; the Exmoor is the only living pony breed to share the same jaw structure. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:24, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

prehistoric land bridge —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.228.249.85 (talk) 19:28, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

This cannot be right: "ponies that migrated from North America across the prehistoric land bridge", there never was such a landbridge!!!

/Ber —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.228.249.85 (talk) 19:23, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Um, at the Bering Strait, yes there was. As for the rest, check evolution of the horse for details. Montanabw^(talk) 07:30, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

There was also a land bridge at that time from mainland Europe to the Brisith Isles!

See: http://www.theotherside.co.uk/tm-heritage/background/channelform.htm

Oooooooohhhhhh! Just found this: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/megaflood/111.asp

I did an absolute heap of research correlating the evolution and migration of equid species with the 'evolution of Earth's land masses' some years back (I occasionally even get cited in people's theses, lol!) so I went into some of this in great depth then. Did you know, f'rinstance, that when the first equids were beginning to appear in 'North America', most of 'North America' was actually under a shallow sea, and the Alps and Himalayas hadn't been formed at that time? (Spain and Italy hadn't yet joined up with the rest of Europe, and the Indian sub-continent was still ponderously making its way towards the main bulk of Asia) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:23, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Mucho debate and discussion at evolution of the horse. Many redlinked subspecies we haven't done articles on, and "Celtic Pony" will raise a howl of protest if not linked to a specific subspecies. Our resident taxonomist is Kim vd Linde, who knows her stuff and occasionally weighs in at WPEQ, (also has a user page to LOL and die for!) and I vet all the taxonomy stuff past her because she is super-anal about it and usually deservedly so because she's generally correct. (I kind of wish she'd let me hang on to a few of my pet theories, but when they are fuzzy and not accurate, I suppose I do deserve the slapping she is so very willing to give me! LOL!) Montanabw^(talk) 19:01, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I am sorry, maybe I can buy you a cup of coffee sometime when I might be close to you.-- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Has to relate to the 'extinct-but-for-the-Exmoors 'type' found in the fossilised remains in Alaska (I think they date from over 3 mya but can't guarantee that off the top of my head). The Exmoor is the only surviving pony / horse breed that equates to the Alaskan 'Celtic pony' fossils, but you can't really call the Exmoor the Cletic, though there's a kinda fan-clubby thing trying to say now that all the Celt-type, Celt-used British ponies should be 'Celtic ponies', including Welshies, Highlands, Shitlands (sorry, Shetlands) and such-like. You could link to the Exmoor, in which there's the subsectiony bit explaining the Celtic pony. It's not an extant breed. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 20:52, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Working on tracking down the exact one, but having trouble; could possibly be Equus niobrarensis alaskae, or equus lambei, but they were found earlier. We should be looking at archaeological stuff from the 1970's. ... I shall keep looking. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ThatPeskyCommoner (talk • contribs) 21:03, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Closest I'm getting at the moment is that it's most likely to be the equivalent of "Pony Type I" (of the original 'four types' which are supposedly the ancestors of all modern breeds. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 21:31, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

OK, can anyone get hold of Speed and Etherington, 1952 -1953???? According to Bennet and Hoffman, which I'm ploughing through at the moment, they're making the (probable) link between e.c. alaskae and the Exmoor :o) Alternatively, Scott, E., R. W. Graham, T. W. Stafford, Jr., and L. D. Martin. 2003. On the validity of Equus laurentius Hay, 1913. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 23 (supplement to no. 3):95A might get you somewhere. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 22:25, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Scott poster.-- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Laurie there isn't what Speed was looking at, then! It only has the standard six molars. So what was Speed looking at, if it's not Hay's horse Laurie? I kinda assumed the Hay specimen (Silly cow! Should never make assumptions!) for the sole reason that I couldn't seem to turf up any references to Alaska fossil (or non-fossil, as with Laurie!) horses that seemed to be more recent than Hay, but pre-dating the Speed work. Kim, what's the E niobrarensis one? Where does "Nio" fit in in the general scheme of things? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:47, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I'll try to find the 2003 article if you need it. But toss Deb Bennett, unfortunately (I like some of her work, but...). That four foundations theory was one of my nearest and dearest. However, as far as being wild prototypes, that was the first thing Kim slapped me upside the head over! LOL! See the citations and summary we did up at Horse#Taxonomy_and_evolution and especially the last paragraph of Horse#Domestication. I had done up a nicely sourced subsection on the four foundations, based primarily on the research of Deb Bennett, but subsequent research this past decade says that the wild prototypes just ain't so. (After I stopped whining and crying over the death of my pet theory, I read the really fascinating scientific journal article studying Y-DNA and such that suggested that it's possible that there was only ONE initially domesticated stallion, though many different lines of mares. Now this makes the Exmoor bone structure theoretically possible, though if they are serious they should do fossil DNA study, IMHO). Am also reading "The Horse, The Wheel, and Language" right now that discusses these studies. Absolutely fascinating, if a tough slog to read through) My current thinking is that the four foundation prototypes are probably more of a landrace, adapted by climate but after domestication. As for horses in North America, remember that they all went extinct for 10,000 years about at the end of the Ice Age, (some theorize it was climate change, others claim it was the hunting pressure of newly-arrived humans) but it is also possible that the earliest forms actually evolved primarily in North America (climate being a very weird thing). You may also want to look at the sources at Sorraia, and Sorraia#Evolution_and_taxonomy as that was another "it's-really-not-a-breed-it's-a-true-ancient-type" breed where they actually did do some studies. Montanabw^(talk) 22:38, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Bennett's hypothesis was very good at the time she proposed it based on what she knew. It's how it goes, more data is gathered and the world moves on. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Apologies: I deleted the bit in the article before checking here. My thinking was:

• The "Celtic pony" stuff does not look worth including at all to me, as we need a great deal more evidence to show a connection between Exmoors and a fossil of a different species in a different continent possibly millions of years earlier.
• I'm not exactly clear what the unique structure of the Exmoor jaw actually is, and we could do with a fuller description of it. However, even if it really is unique (not one of those breed folklore "facts"), I suspect it's a bit of a red herring. Such variants are often produced by a few or even single genes, and if so, it could have arisen spontaneously, independently of any other occurrence. It would need more than that single feature to prove a connection.
• Y-DNA evidence tells us about the male line, but nothing about the rest of the ancestry. MtDNA could tell us more, but even that only covers the matrilineal line: most genetic material comes from the myriad lines in between. It's perfectly possible to have a patrilineal ancestor from one place, a matrilineal ancestor from another, but most of the other genetic material from somewhere else entirely. What we need are studies of more of the genome.
• In the case of domestic horses in Britain, it's most unlikely that there is any local connection between wild horses and native pony breeds: there is really quite a long gap between the latest confirmed tarpan evidence in the British Peninsula at around 11,000 BCE (Derek Yalden, The History of British Mammals, 1999, pp 76–78) and the likely domestication of the horse beginning around 4,000 BCE.

Richard New Forest (talk) 08:08, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

We're beginning to get some stuff together (at least Montana is, lol!) which you can currently find on my Exmoor sandbox, and also check out the stuff on my talk page. Speed and Etherington did the stuff in the 1950's, and we can't find any reference to anyone having debunked what they did. The jaw structure is shared only between the Exmoor and the (probably) Equus caballus alaskae fossils (not sure at present if E c alaskae is the same as Hay's 1913(?) Equus niobrarensis alaskae) - so not really a different species as such - and the main distinguishing feature of it is the beginnings of a seventh molar tooth, which is quite a major difference, structurally, from other extant breeds. The Exmoor was pretty much almost certainly probably (lol!) separated from the mainland Euro stocks very early on - way before the end of the last ice age - as geological surveys done for digging the Channel tunnel revealed the existence of a minor rift valley (several kilometers wide) in the straits of Dover, and later research (which I've only just found) points to a 'mega-flood' sometime between 200K - 400K years ago. Now, as you're in the Forest, you'll appreciate this one on a personal level, if you've ever considered traipsing across one of our lovely bogs! If one has a geological structure which will 'pocket water', and one then fills it with soft silt, sand, etc. from a flood, what one gets is an expanse of evil-tempered deep bog and (in the Dover straits) sandbanks / quicksand. No equid in its right mind is going to attempt to cross several kilometers of said evil-tempered bog, unless there is absolultely massive pressure from lack of food - which there wasn't, on either side of the boglands. So, bearing in mind the geological structures, the likelihood is that to all intents and purposes the Exmoor was separated from the parent stocks hundreds of thousands of years ago. Speed and Etherington certainly found (or referred to) archeolocal material which proved that the Exie and a larger animal were both in Britain way before man was, but until we can access the actual paper we don't know exactly what that was. The Exie-type pre-dated the larger horse. We may well have to drag in the refs I found to the Devon rift valley stuff, as well as tyrying to grab the Speed and Etherington stuff, to (a) expand this section quite a bit, or (b) get together a new page for what Speed and Etherington called the "Universal Pony" and others have called the "Celtic pony". Quite a project, but I feel probably worth tackling. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 12:11, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

The Exmoor Pony - Its Origins and Characteristics

by J.G. & M.G. Speed

(known as The Speed Papers)

Published by Countrywide Livestock, 1977 this may give us something ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 13:19, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

"Experiments have been conducted on the fossilised remains of the original Celtic pony found in Alaska and compared with those of the Exmoor. They have revealed the same shape jaw bones and the beginnings of a seventh molar tooth found in no other breed. Because of its remote habitat in Devon and Somerset it is one of the purist of the Mountain and Moorland breeds in Great Britain, having undergone very little infusion of outside blood. Much research was carried out on the skeletal structures and dentition of the Exmoor pony by Professor Speed and others scientists. " ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 13:29, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

See abstract at: http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19510101043.html Maybe Montana can get the whole paper for us to play with :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 13:54, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

There's quite a lot there, but I don't think it comes to much:

• Is there any modern taxonomist who says E caballus as we now know it occurred in N America? The Alaskan horse now seems to be given specific rank: E alaskae.
• If a seventh molar is all it is, that's not really that different – it's just more of the same. I have a friend who was born with six digits on each limb, and this aberration occurs in unrelated populations all over the world. Someone else I know has no wisdom teeth at all, not even on X-rays. As I said above we need proper, broader genome information.
• The mega-flood you're thinking of was a much earlier separation event: 200,000 to 400,000 years ago is long before the last glaciation (400,000 would be about four glaciations ago). Britain was certainly joined to mainland Europe during the last glaciation, when the sea level was far lower and the North Sea was dry ("Doggerland"), so animals could go round even if the Channel area itself was impassable at that time. The latest separation is thought to be only around 6,500 years ago (see Great Britain#Geographical definition for a fuller explanation). Presumably the gorge (technically not a rift valley, as despite the efforts of the loony separatists we remain on the same continental plate as mainland Europe...) was anyway filled in with sediments during later glaciations and interglacials, as it's now buried under a flattish sea-bed (there's also a gorge buried under the bed of the Thames and at least some other rivers).
• No horses can have been cut off by the last separation event, as they appear to have become extinct in Britain long before the Channel formed again. The British "native" pony (including what later became the Exmoor) must therefore have been brought later by people, however much we'd like to claim it as truly native.
• That 1950s work will have been purely anatomical, and must be very dated. I'm not sure many modern workers would bother to debunk it – they've essentially started afresh since then. Certainly the equivalent cattle stuff from that time has been more or less completely abandoned. I'd not use anything of this kind done before about 1970, when protein structure comparison began to be used widely, and I'd prefer to stick to direct genetic studies.

I was wondering about turning out some Koniks – might upset the purists, but that'd certainly get some tarpan blood back into the Foresters... Better than dratted Shetlands, anyway. Richard New Forest (talk) 14:45, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

alaskae is a probably a synonym for ferus (caballus is a subspecies). There are only two cabaline species in Noither America, one is the wild horse as we know it, the other is the stiled legged horse. The taxonomy is lagging behind with fixing the issue.-- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 20:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Had a quick look at the sandbox, and the abstract. I really don't think any of those 1950s refs are runners: I'd use them for anatomical info (that is, the real science in them), but I think all the speculation looks very stringy indeed. Richard New Forest (talk) 14:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I think Kim (can't remember full username, but Montanabw knows who I mean) is our best bet on the taxonomy. The whole thingie about the primitiveness of the Exie does go back to the 100K+ ya mark (probably even the 200K-400K megaflood thing). I don't think equines did bcome extinct in Britain; I think the Exie-ancestors stayed put. But we'll have to find a lot more sources for both sides, even if only to do a 'controversy' section. I know Speed and Etherington were still being cited very recently (2005-6) by others. My own feeling with getting some ancient blood back into anything is that the Sorraia is likely to be a better bet than the Konik, as the current Konic is a real hotch-potch, including Przewalski stuff (eastern Eurasian, so totally different lineage from the Tarpan-types). And the Exie people won't have it as they like to keep their Exier 'pure' to what Mary Etherington was doing in the late 40's and early 50's. Anyhoo, quite a project. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 15:10, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Without wanting to get into any kind of argument (confrontation is almost always counter-productive) I feel it's a mis-step to wander into anything along the lines of 'anything old must be wrong / outdated'. The Exie jaw-thing isn't just the occasional one-off, it's pretty much standard for the breed, whereas human polydactyly is usually a congenital 'mistake' rather than hard-wired in the DNA. The 'Speed Papers' book dates to the late 70's, so there may have been some mention of more recent work / investigations than the original 1950's stuff. Montana has access to a lot of stuff I can't get to without paying for; we'll see what happens with it all and go from there. And again Kim should be able to clarify, but I think it's still Equus caballus alaskae, rather than E. alaskae. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 15:36, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

polydactyly is a hox-gene mutation issue, comes with increased changes of cancer etc. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 20:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

How and where and when and why (exactly, precisely!) does it mutate, Kim? Is it heritable? (I don't seem to recall, off-hand, any instances where it's passed down form parent to child ... but my recall, though darned good, is not infallible, lol!) You can answer on my talk page so's not to pollute the Exie talk page :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:39, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

polydactyly is congenital but also genetic. We acquire many new mutations each generation, and the bad ones get still born or don't get spontaneously aborted in an early stage. Yes, it is heritable, but many of them come also with increased changes of cancer etc., causing the genes to be eliminated again as well. Look at the wikipage, it explains quite well. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:20, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

TPC, a good example of genetic mutations is dominant white. There are currently about 11 different W alleles identified in horses, each of which are nearly all traceable to a specific white individual born within the past 100 years. The one that popped up in Arabians freaked me out (white Arabians used to be barred from registration as "impure"), but he was born in the 1990s of two dark parents, DNA parentage verified and so they had to take him because they'd repealed the white rule on body spots. His owners scratched their heads and promoted him as "sabino-white" for years, even though SB-1 has never been found yet in a sabino Arabian. Turns out when he was negative for SB-1, he was found to be a "mutant!"  ;-) It's a good example of something heritable (highly so, as a dominant), yet rare because even a lot of breeders select against it, and in the wild, anything born pure white is a predator magnet! Thus, when it appears in the wild, even though it isn't necessarily a health problem, it will probably be gone in a couple of generations (if the animal in question even lives to reproduce in the first place), only to crop up later in totally unrelated animals with the mutation spontaneously pops up again. I think that gray was also a spontaneous mutation, the U of Uppsala did a study finding that all gray horses trace to a single common ancestor that lived several thousand years ago. Grays would last a bit longer in a semi-feral state, because the "eat me, I'm a target" white would not necessarily be full-blown by sexual maturity, but they still would be uncommon in the wild because they'd probably have fewer offspring before they got all-white and the cougar got them! (ditto for big spots too.) Spashy, flashy white is almost always an indicator of domestication, not just in horses, but in other animals too. They did a cool study of it in foxes, once. Montanabw^(talk) 21:19, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I am dim today! I've just about realised that you were talking about infusing fresh blood into the Foresters, lol! Looking at the potential for much harsher UK winters (only needs minor disruption of the THC to achieve it), I think the best intermix-breeds we could go for would be a combination of Highlands, Exies, Darties and Sorraias, with enough of the Sorraia in there to counteract the shoulder/neck inflexibility (comparitive) of our heavier native breeds. Thre's nothing to compare with the Sorraira for lateral and longitudinal flexibility, and they can happily survive really extreme changes in weather.

On the equids-became-extinct in the UK - why would they, when one comes to think about it? Glaciation and ice-cap cover got no lower than just north of London, and things don't usually go extinct for no reason. The south west corner of Britain would still have been providing a perfectly viable habitat for the small equids. Any idea where whoever dredged up the 'they went extinct' idea got their data from? To the best of my knowledge, it conflicts with the previous archaeological data. The mini-rift valley was definitely discovered (and caused problems for the Chunnellers). No need for a rift valley to be on a separate continental plate, really - an earth fault of that kind of order can appear close to the edges of a plate, and the whole of the UK is pretty close to the edge of the Euro continental plate. The earth crust has shifted downward under the straits between two pretty parallel fault lines (see http://www.theotherside.co.uk/tm-heritage/background/channelform.htm), and that in itself, before any infilling with deep bog, would have deterred major (and unnecessary) herd movements. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 19:12, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Not sure I was entirely serious about the Konik thing...

I agree, argument is not productive: I'm just trying to be rigorous, and I do agree that the theory is plausible and very attractive. I just can't make it convincing.

The gully in the Channel was a wash-out gorge – there was no earth movement involved, just erosion, like pouring water on a heap of sand. But whatever it was, it was at quite the wrong time for the theory, and as I say, it got filled in again later.

Yalden is a very reliable source for absence of evidence of horse from Britain – he's reviewed all the archaeological data. He does mention a few possible records with doubtful dates from Neolithic times, but these are still far too young for the theory. Absence of records is only negative information, so of course it doesn't mean it did go extinct, and personally I'd be delighted if it didn't – but 7,000 years is a very, very long time to have no records at all, when there are records for lots of other species. Worth bearing in mind that for most of that time we were Mesolithic in culture, so our only interest in horses would have been as food. We hunted every other large mammal here to extinction, and it would be quite surprising if we'd left horses standing, so there's a very good reason indeed why horses would go extinct. In a small island animals can only run so far... None of the megafauna became extinct in previous interglacials, before Homo sapiens got going in Europe: as you say, why would they?

I'm not rejecting the 1950s work on grounds of age as such, and as I say, I would use it for anatomy. My problem is that the understanding of almost everything else relevant has developed by such an enormous amount since then that such work has been left high and dry – this goes for quite a few other fields of course. If the 1970s stuff does update the earlier work with more modern techniques (which I doubt, as it's the same author), then we need that ref. No modern author would expect anatomy to stand up on its own without corroboration, especially a single feature like that.

I still think the jaw structure is a red herring. It may be associated with lots of other genetic markers and if so, they may show something when taken together, but one gene doesn't tell us much, and on its own it only shows that the Exmoor is different – which of course we knew already. What we don't seem to know yet is why it's different. I suspect the founder effect might be the most likely explanation, as it probably is for odd genetic features of many other breeds. Richard New Forest (talk) 20:47, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

My view is that what we know of the Exie ancestry at the moment is likely to be just the tip of an iceberg! As you say, it's darned hard to prove a negative. The jaw structures thing was one of the first ways that the equid fossils first got differentiated from each other, which is why I'm personally inclined to take it relatively seriously. To be totally honest, I think the thing that 'got' me was probably no more than tiredness on your part, but I felt it was a bit strong to dismiss Professor Speed's work as 'nonsense theories', lol! I'm sure you meant no disrespect to him (he was pretty well-thought-of, and a Dick Vet. School professor). And as for age, Mendel's stuff is pretty old :o) Right, on the whole, but pretty old. We really do need a proper mtDNA / aDNA / DNA comparison going with the Alaskan fossils and the modern-day Exmoors to get anything 'modernly substantial' on it. But I have a feeling that, when we do, it's more likely to back up the 'ancient Exmoor' thing than rebut it. And, while we're talking about Mesolithic hunters, do take a look at the first specimen in my new Unofficial WikiZoo. I'm sure you'll love it (that is, if you don't choke on your coffee). ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 21:03, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Jaw structure is really not a big deal. Look at dogs, all one species, but the variation in breeds is far bigger than the variation in the whole family. The DNA with the Alaskan fossils has been done, multiple times now, and the exmoor is not closely related to those. There is some structuring among the horse breeds, with the exmoor in the group of generally primitive ponies such as the Fjord, Shetland, Icelandic etc. Molar increases is likely just a single mutation. If the mutation sticks around in the population, even when it is absent most of the time, it has the chance to pop up again in any group using a bit of inbreeding. At the time of Speed, he worked with what he had available, and his hypothesis was not out of the ordinary. However, we know so much more, and DNA (Ancient and new) has really thrown around our ideas about horse evolution so much that we only start to grasp what is going on. The taxonomy has not yet been updated, but we have major issues there that need addressing some day. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 20:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Article improvement

The article could use a "uses" section, the last two little paragraphs in the history section are really about the use of the breed. Except, there are only two little paragraphs to put into it, so there is some illogic to a new header -- but they aren't "history," really. There's a larger question for WPEQ if we have the right structure for these breed articles in the task force instructions and if those should be revised... Just thoughts. Montanabw^(talk) 17:46, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

In articles where there isn't enough info to have a seperate "uses" section I normally put the information into the "characteristics" section, like in Florida Cracker Horse. I just didn't do it in this article since I was mainly worried about getting to the point where the tag could be removed. A discussion about changing the recommended structure would probably be better located on the main project page. Dana boomer (talk) 18:57, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Well, can we move those two sentences up to the Characteristics section, then? ;-) Montanabw^(talk) 00:09, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Done. Dana boomer (talk) 02:19, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I managed to find sources for 'ancient uses' of the Exmoor, which I am dead chuffed about :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 20:48, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Nice work! Wish we could figure out what taxon the alleged "Celtic Pony" happens to be, though, as that is a touchy claim. Montanabw^(talk) 21:07, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

e.c. Alaskae? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:17, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Where did the 'descended from ferals' come from?

I'm sure the original Exmoor ponies weren't descended from ferals ...... I'm pretty sure they were living in SW England quite possibly before humans got there, even? And I can't trace who put the bit about 'descended from ferals in the Celtic Age' in there (I'm getting very tired :o( ) Anyone have any major objections to me removing the bit about descended from Celtic-age ferals? (It doin't tally with the unique jaw/tooth (7th molar) thingie, either) Where did the Celtic-age domestics in the area come from in the first place, if it wasn't from the original wild stock? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:15, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Pasted here: The Exmoor Pony-and a survey of the evolution of horses in Britain. Pt. I. SPEED, J. G.; ETHERINGTON, M. G.; British Veterinary Journal, 1952, 108, 329-338, http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19540100426.html Pt. I. Earlier suggestions [see A. B. A., 19, No. 1036] that the Exmoor Pony type was the first modern horse in Britain, and may even have evolved there, are further discussed and developed. A larger, pack-horse type is also known to have been extant in Britain before the end of the last Ice Age, but is not represented in such early strata as the small pony. Both types were in the country long before man. (Thanks, Montana!) So ......... definitely not descended from Celtic Age ferals :o) I shall remove that bit. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:33, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

A 1950s source is not going to pass muster, other than as a source! I did the feral thing (grinning, ducking and running). See all the other talk today, including above (and I found those 1950s refs you were looking for, see your talk page). We have a major debate across WPEQ on the "pure wild" origins of a number of breeds (so far, there have been editing spats over Arabians, Andalusian/PRE, Barbs, the Sorraia and a couple others. The Andalusian crowd is particularly obsessed about purity, but DNA evidence is DNA evidence, LOL!) and so anyone making a "our breed was REALLY developed from an original wild prototype" claim is viewed with considerable suspicion. The Anthony book I'm reading proposes that while it was relatively easy to find mares willing to accept a pecking order due to the hierarchical nature of a herd, stallions with a submissive attitude would not have reproduced in the wild, and hence it would have been a fortuitous combo of someone taming a tamable stallion who would pass on a more gentle attitude. The "possibly only one domesticated stallion" theory suggests that descendants of the horse I jokingly call "Mr. Nerd" (A tameable wild stallion whose gentle nature meant he couldn't get a herd of his own mares without human help because he was too nice to fight with the other boys...) were crossed on many, many local wild mares. So I'll grant ya 50% wild, maybe! I'll see if I can find the journal article online, I downloaded a pdf to my computer. Montanabw^(talk) 23:34, 22 February 2011 (UTC) Follow up:Found some stuff, see your talk page.

I'd like to find more on this: Exmoors seem to be lumped in as "primitive" types along with the Icelandic and the Sorraia. "Genetic diversity and relationships of Portuguese and other horse breeds based on protein and microsatellite loci variation" C. Luís1, R. Juras2, M. M. Oom1, E. G. Cothran2 Article first published online: 11 JAN 2007 DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2052.2006.01545.x Montanabw^(talk) 01:08, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

All this stuff on the Exies as a truly primitive breed goes back to the Speed (he was a professor at the Royal (Dick) School/College (whatever!) of Veterinary Medicine, Edinburgh) studies on the Exie; I think he was so thorough that nobody has seen fit yet to question what he and Etherington said about it - so unlikely to find any more modern 'sources' until someone does a direct aDNA/DNA comparison between the Exie and the Alaska fossils which share the same (unique) jaw structure. Which I doubt if they will do! (no money in it, lol!) In the absence of anything truly modernly definitive, could we go with the "It is claimed that the Exmoor pony is similar to the native horse which existed in Britain over 100, 000 years ago, and present lines of research indicate that this type formed the country's " basic horse stock. " The skeletal conformation considered typical of the indigenous horse is found in some of the present Exmoor stock." quote from the 1950 Veterinary Record? P.S. I'll let you off the feral thing, but only coz I like you!ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:41, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Gates was happy to cite Speed and Etherington in 1979 :o) Come to think of it, the Gates thing is maybe what I was remembering when I said we maybe should be looking at stuff from the 1970's. Can't remember where I said that, but I know I did! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:57, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Waring in 1983, and Bennet in 1999 also cited Speed and Etherington :o) Of course, we have now come full circle and got back to Bennet and Hoffman, which is where I found the mention of Speed and Etherington in the first place, lol! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 10:10, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

... and how do you fancy Uppsala 2005-6 (Märta Claesson Lundin) :o) (... on the basis of "What's good enough for Uppsala should be good enough for us!") ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 10:17, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

... and the Icies are not blinkin' "primitive", lol! There were no Icies, as such, until about 1,000 years ago, when the 'mongrel foundation stock' were taken over there by the Vikings, having been almost certainly picked up in northern Britain, in the first place! And the Brits, Vikings et al. had been horse-trading between / amongst themselves and a whole heap of Euro-tribes for a long time before that. There were no horses at all on Iceland prior to that. Shameless copy'n'paste follows: "Iceland was settled between 874 AD and 935 AD. The settlers came in open boats and brought their lifestock with them. Before that, Iceland's biggest mammal was the arctic fox. The settlers vere very often indipendent people that didn't want to be ruled by the norwegian king, thus moving to this island without any kings. The settlers couldn't take many animals with them when moving to Iceland, their ships weren't big enough. So propably the chiefs only took the best of their best when bringing horses to Iceland, and when there were horses enough, import stopped. The nature molded the breed thereafter. The settlers came from Norway, the Western Isles of Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man. The foundation stock for the Icelandic horse was, therefore, drawn from all of these regions. The icelandic horse has without doubt kept it's characteristics better than any of the breeds that are it's forefathers. " The Icelanders (people) then selectively bred for both colour and 'gaitedness', which is why the Icies have so much of the pseudo-primitive 'gaited' characteristic. And they got bottlenecked in the late 1700's, which explains why so little genetic variation.ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 10:01, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I would like to see some expansion of the landrace article. I'm fascinated by the concept that animals will adapt to their environment (and hence to a more "primitive" type) given time and a relative lack of human interference. The Icelandics have clearly reverted to a type well able to survive in Iceland, and clearly share features of related animals. As for Dr. Speed, my thinking is that you can cite the source directly and just say " a 1953 (or whenever) study proposed the theory (or hypothesis) that... blah, blah, blah." Actually, look at what Pitke did with Finnhorse in explaining the history of various theories over the years. They had to endure some loopy theories too (Like Finnhorses being descended from the Przewalski, a thoroughly debunked theory) Montanabw^(talk) 21:42, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Just the answer the question in the title, Exmoors have all characteristic of belonging to the domesticated heard, including the Y-chromosome and the physical characteristics, and most importantly, the capacity to ride and drive them. And by definition, any domesticated horse roaming free is feral. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 20:45, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Re the Sorraias

(I wanna Sorraia!) has anyone yet done the mtDNA comparison between the 'true' Sorraias and the Sorraia-type Mustangs? I know it was kinda in the pipeline. And I'd tend to agree, at a first-off-hunch, that the Sorraia is probably the closest living relative to the Iberian-variety Tarpan. Probably just wishful thinking, but the Sorraias were so bottlenecked in the 1920's that I doubt if anything much can be really done with Sorraia/Tarpan DNA comparison. :o( Shame. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:47, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

The tests are so far all quite consistent in finding that the true Tarpan is unrelated to any of the so-called "primitive" breeds. The so-called modern "tarpans" like the Pottock or the Heck horse are also not related to the extinct Tarpan. Given that Mustangs (what hangs around in my state, we host the Pryor Mountain herd) all descended from Spanish-type horses of various sorts, some will look more Sorraia-ish than others. But my bottom line is that so far, any claims of any modern breed being some sort of newly discovered or well-preserved "wild" prototype have been proven to be pretty much hogwash. (I got into this due to the claims made for the Arabian and Andalusian, both being breeds I like, but with some pie-in-the-sky breeders obsessed with pedigree purity and claiming pure descent from ancient wild ancestors of antiquity -- some Arabian breeders even wanting to claim the breed as a separate subspecies -- :-P -- You really don't want to see the can of whoopass I like to open up when I get into a debate with the so-called "straight Egyptian" breeders over their inbred, crooked-legged, crappy-dispositioned "absolutely pure" horses that they keep trying to claim should be a whole different breed from other Arabians. (I can't find proof yet, but there are persistent rumors that the Waler horses left behind in Egypt by the Aussies after WWI may have crossed on some SE's promoted today as "purebred" Arabian, which would be pee-pants funny if true!) Montanabw^(talk) 21:42, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed

Prior content in this article duplicated one or more previously published sources. The material was copied from: http://everythingexmoor.org.uk/exmoor-encyclopedia/contents-list/38-e/409-exmoor-ponies.html. Infringing material has been rewritten or removed and must not be restored, unless it is duly released under a compatible license. (For more information, please see "using copyrighted works from others" if you are not the copyright holder of this material, or "donating copyrighted materials" if you are.) For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or published material; such additions will be deleted. Contributors may use copyrighted publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously, and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. While we appreciate contributions, we must require all contributors to understand and comply with these policies. Thank you.  Chzz  ►  03:40, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully what I have done with the re-write will be acceptable - it comes down to pretty much what you'll find on any bog-standard page anywhere about the Exmoor pony :o) (including the obvious kind of stuff that the breed society themselves bung out to all and sundry). ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 06:53, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Speculation, original research and irrelavancy

I removed the first paragraph of the breed history section as it was lacking citations, consisted of wild speculation not supported by any evidence that is out there, and was pieced together in a way that made it pretty much original research. Furthermore, even if it was true, most of it was relevant for ALL horses on the British Islands and not related to the exmoor. Extraordinary claims such as being a special ancient lineage have to be backed up with extraordinary evidence and not just a few pieces together suggestions. The Exmoor is within the primitive pony group, but there is nothing to suggest it is unique and the more recent studies (Plos one, see my talk, I am to lazy to get it now), shows far more haplotype variation than previously thought. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 16:34, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to salvage a way of mentioning some of this because if its a common belief among enthusiasts, it's best to talk about it and clarify. For example, in Arabian horse, we had to hit a couple myths head on -- the "always" five lumbar vertebrae thing (easy to explain with 6-vertebrae proof) and the way Arab enthusiasts are also fond of the "pure wild horse" hypothesis to the point where some argued it was a separate species. We discuss it and explain why and how it is not so. Pitke is doing a similar thing at Finnhorse, discussing the history of breed origin theories from past to present. I think there is a way to phrase things but explain that the theory is apt to be dubious in light of more recent research. Sometimes keeping the speculative stuff, addressed in context, is helpful. On the other hand, it's an endless debate at electric fence whether it's a fringe thing to discuss the urban legend of the urination dangers or not ... I tend to favor mentioning it if for no reason than how it keeps reappearing on its own like a self-replicating virus if we pretend it doesn't exist.  :-P Montanabw^(talk) 07:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I think there is no problem with discussing tghe past hypothesis. I actually think it is kind of essential to do that so that the issue does not come up over and over again. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Aha! The electric fence / urination thing! Eyewitness acount here: we used to use flexinet electric fencing on my smallholding about 20-25 years ago. Friend's visiting dog trotted out one morning, cocked leg up to said flexinet, screamed, and shot back into the house with tail firmly tucked between legs. And then proceeded to engage in a really thorough 'make it better' washing of genitals. And flatly refused to go anywhere near the area where the evil monster had bitten his 'bits' for quite some time! Sooooooooo - if you could actually have asked him what the effect was, he may have been able to provide some first-hand evidence, lol! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:03, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I can see how the chances of actually hitting an electrified net would be greater than a single wire. But also sounds like the fellow was stung, not fried, thus the urban legend (why are city people such idiots?) is debunked that far! Montanabw^(talk) 21:19, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

And Kim, I'd dig that cup of coffee. Heck, you get this far west, I'll buy! You've always been scrupulously fair even while smacking me roundly about the head and shoulders! LOL! (Besides, I'm not about to get snippy with someone who can wield her own sword! =:-O ) Montanabw^(talk) 07:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, I do occasionally! I will let you know when. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I think we need to find (or do? Kim, you volunteering?) some real in-depth studies on the Exmoor thing. The 'Exmoors are truly primitive' stuff has been going around for so long, and so many people "know" it to be "true", that if it isn't, we need to highlight some really sound, modern science to sum up the total of what can and can't be said, and get the 'real truth' out there instead. I personally don't have any particular axe to grind on behalf of, or against, the Exmoors - I'm a seeker after truth wherever possible, and like any other human, delighted when science actually supports myth, but when it comes to a choice, give me science over myth any day! Does anyone know which of the UK fossil records Speed was referring to when he said that there were two types of equine in the UK from ancient times (100,000ya, approx) - both pre-dating man's migration into the UK? Has any work been done on the stuff he was referring to? What's the 'history' on those records? Where do they fit in? That kind of thing :-) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:24, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I looked, and there is no in depth Exmoor study that I could find, but the picture that arises from the studies done that include exmoors is pretty straight forward. As for speeds work, no idea. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

And re sword-wielding, I got taught that! And then improvised on it, lol! My fencing instructor wouldn't let me do competitions; he said it wouldn't be right to 'subject' (I am trying to remember his exact words here) some poor unsuspecting competitor to having to face 'a grinning maniac on the wrong end of a foil'! But he also said he'd have loved the opportunity to coach me in real two-handed blade combat stuff - sword and sword-breaker, or sword and dagger. I would have sooooooo loved that! I used, in fun-sparring with him, to do a fast-switch from right-handed to left-handed, just to see if I could catch him out :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:28, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

MY thinking is to sandbox a good summary of Speed's actual research, starting with a sentence like "In the early 1950s, Speed studied, blah, blah, blah and found [really cool skeletal stuff]. From that evidence, he speculated that [blah, blah blah fossil stuff]. However his hypothesis was not borne out by later research. More recent studies have indicated [blah, blah, blah]." All properly cited, of course. And it sounds like we also need Richard, and maybe also a paleogeologist. I'll just stick to wordsmithing and copyediting. And, sadly, I cannot find anything other that that CAB abstract, seems too old for most of the other databases I can access. Maybe someone at a Uni in the UK can do better. Montanabw^(talk) 07:46, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Sounds good. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

That sounds like a good plan. I don't know any UK-uni type people (apart from e-chat, and working on the round ups, I am virtually a hermit. Not really intentional, but a combination of character and circumstances).

Here's a question: how can I take a diagram from any of those papers, and point to bits on it, and say "What's this bit mean, then? Explain! Teach!" to Kim? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:36, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, we don't want to put those diagrams in the article, because they are hard to decipher if you do not know where you are looking at. However, if you have questions, by all means ask them here or at my talk. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 19:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Those Questions on the Phylogenetic Tree Stuff

OK! I've grabbed the couple of relevant bits from the 2010 study's diagram. Piece one should be here ... that little node upline from the B1 and B2 clusters was, according to the 2002 study (where this diagram derives from) comprised ONLY of Exmoors. With the downline nodes including various other breeds (and at least one Fjord, from my recollection). I think that means that those downline breeds (or at least those particular individuals within those downline breeds) all had proto-Exmoor ancestry. And I think the time-between-mutations thing would place the proro-Exmoor node at least 26K years old. And I think that node is only one mutation away from coalescence. Is any of this correct?

Piece two should be here, and that's the cluster that contains the other Exmoors, and Icies, and Fjords, and I think also Shetlands and Highlands (but I'm relying entirely on memory here, coz I cba to go and double-check, and anyway what else is in that node isn't really relevant). As that's springing off completely differently, I think this means that its a matrilinear line totally different to, and not descending from, the B-line. (And from memory the intervening node there in the pattern was Arab in origin). Which would mean that some of the today's Exmoors descended from mares (actually a mare) which didn't share the exact same mtDNA as anything else (a 'pure node'), and others descended from mares (a mare) which was descended, with various other individuals of other Nordic-type breeds, from a different foundation mare. And I think it's unlikely that either lot would have been bottlenecked to the extent that only one breeding mare was actually available at a given time, so I'm assuming that those mares lived in herds. Is it also safe to assume that the herd with the pure-node descendants (pre-B1), having no other breeds in the background, hadn't at the point of origin of the downline been influenced by imports from mankind (as B1 was present in the late Pleistocene, before mankind started horse-tading around the world), and was thus almost certainly in the pre-mankind British native herd? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 13:36, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Okay, we just do not know enough. You are putting way to much emphasis on aspects that should not get it. For example, take this scenario. 500 years ago, someone imported some horses from somewhere carrying the B1 haplotype. They did well and as a result, they are plenty in the Exmoor now. This scenario is indistinguishable from the scenario of ancient UK-influx of mares. The ONLY way to know that for sure is ancient DNA samples from the UK that show that B1 was abundant there. We know that the ONLY B1 sample of the Pleistocene was NOT from the UK but from central Europe, see figure 5 of the PLOS one article. Until we get more ancient DNA sample beyond the the single Ireland sample we have now, we won't have any basis to say either or. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 15:50, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Looks to me like the old "correlation versus causation" issue. Just because a link or similarity exists doesn't prove there is a cause and effect relationship. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". Montanabw^(talk) 16:52, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Yup, and if you are not really familiar with it, it can look like a Rorschach Test image.... ;-)-- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 16:59, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

LOL! Someone once asked me what an ink-blot looked like (no, I don't go into the circumstances). Me, being me, hummed and hawed for a while, turning it this way and that, and then said "Hey, this looks really like ... a Rorschach ink-blot test!" I think all we can go with, then, is that we just don;t know enough yet to be positive one way or the other, so I'll see what I can come up with on that front. Kim, please keep me updated if you hear of / come across anyone doing anything more specific to the prehistoric British pony? I need to know .... I have these obsessive personal needs, ya know! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 19:57, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Errrrrmmmmmmmmm ..... what about the only-Exie node ..... what does it meeeeeeeeeeeeean! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 19:59, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Uuuummmmmmmmmmm ......... and according to the Fig 5 of the PLoSone article, there's nothing in mainland UK in the period 1000BC to 600AD .... and what's the one over in Ireland in the Pleistocene? (I am the most God-awful pain in the butt - sorry about that!) According to the colour chart, it's an X3. In Ireland, in the Pleistocene. Now I am confused, lol! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 20:13, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Awww, Jeeze - I wish they hadn't changed all the letters around! The 'old' B1 was recategorised as 'I1', and the 'new' B1 is what used to be the C-node. So ... now I'm talking about the 'old pre-B1 node' which is now the 'old pre I1 node'. Does that make it more confusing, or less? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 20:40, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

OK, they are now here and here with the new classifications. (You love me really, don't you?) :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 20:58, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Okay, you have to give me a few days till I have caught up with some stuff, and then I will make a complete section about the genetic origins of the Exmoor for the article. Look through the subplementary material to see that there are more than the two haplotypes present in the Exmoor (D and F for example). There is really no basis to assume that the exmoor is anything special with regard to age and origin. In fact, the more ai see, the more it is obvious just one of the many horses. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 21:57, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Kim, you are an absolute star! And I do apologise for being a total nuisance, really I do. I have no idea WTF X3 is doing in the Pleistocene/Holocene in Ireland - any ideas? (I will go back to the 2002 study to trace what breeds turned up in that, if I can). And can you just confirm whether or not I'm right in thinking that that old "pre-I" Exies-only node (I know it's not the only place where the Exies turn up, but it seems to be the only place where only Exies turn up) has to be several thousand years (one mutation) earlier than the I-line which followed it? You are a truly wonderful human being for putting up with me like this :o) I will be your slave for ever (or at least till the end of the week, lol!) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 22:24, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Here's the Exie-node per the 2002 study, if it helps. Between the 2002 and 2010 studies there seems to have been a complete mish-mash of wtf's happening with the A-lines stuff (can't compare t'other with which); something A-line seems to be comparable to X3 ... but darned hard to make head nor tail of it. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:17, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

I see that you are swimming, and you make way to much of details. Which is understandable. Later this week I should have some time to pen something that is more comprehensive and understandable. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 00:17, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Sit tight, TPC, it's easy to go down the rabbit hole with this stuff. If Kim can cook something up, it will be a very sound base. We can build from there so long as we don't venture back into OR or mythic territory (unless defined as such). Montanabw^(talk) 18:48, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Kim, I like swimming. And as for making way too much of details, well wt* do you expect an obsessive to do, huh?! (lol, laugh with me.....) But I do think we have something lurking in there. Honest I do. (And as I am a pure lunatic genius, I must be right. And I'm sooooo modest with it!)

Montana, so what's wrong with rabbit holes? Wolfcubs like rabbits! And sometimes you find an actual rabbit in the hole. Or out of the hat. Or out of my tree. Or something. And it does say quite clearly on my user page that I am a vile horror to work with, as obsessives often are :o) But you both love me loads, yes? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 16:14, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I won't speak for Kim (some days, she doesn't really love any of us if we are too big of pains in the you-know-where), but yes, (scratching wolfcub behind ears) you're still my buddy! Even if I have to drag you out of rabbit holes by your tail when you get stuck in one. LOL! Montanabw^(talk) 21:24, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

[wags tail] I cannot help being me .... I've been working on 'change' for over five decades now, and all I've managed to achieve is being happier with what I am. So not much hope for much change, lol! Tell you what, though, if you ever want someone to chew away at something until its bare bones have been revealed (meanwhile defending the carcass from marauding cougars, coyote, vultures and all, lol!) then the Wolfcub is happy to oblige :o) I am also an obsessive-compulsive cleaner-of-kitchens. And tack rooms. And farmyards. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 04:05, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I can get that. At least you've figured out cute and endearing! I have trouble with that part; I think (judging by the number of times I have been called a certain term) I may have emerged full-grown she-wolf, sort of like Aphrodite from the sea, but not as alluring! I do wish we had the Star Trek transporter, though, as I'd immediately bring you over here to assist with my humble abode! LOL! (And we just won't talk about my garage...) Montanabw^(talk) 21:28, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Heheheheheeeeee! Cub gotta waaaaabbit, cub gotta waaaabbit! See below :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:26, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

The Exie-Node - all revamped etc.

(and yup, it's just ported across from the other places).

HERE's the marked-up image part of the 2002-study phylogenetic network. Note: the 2010 made no other changes to this section of the network, other than (importantly!) to re-name these B-clusters/nodes as I-clusters/nodes. And the 2002 C-clusters were renamed as B-clusters. I could seriously shake those 2010 people warmly by the throat for having done something so completely unnecessary and frustratingly confusing! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 16:08, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Genetics

Okay, here we go:

In recent years, DNA research has led to a rather different picture with regard of the origin of the Exmoor Pony than previously thought. Two sources of genetic material obtained from Exmoor Ponies, Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), have been studied. The Y-chromosome is passed on through the paternal line, and shows no genetic variation across the world except for a second y-chromosome haplotype in China, suggesting that only a very limited number of stallions contributed to the domestic horse. The Exmoor Pony shares the general Y-chromosome haplotype.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed on though the maternal line, and is far more variable than the Y-chromosome, indicating that a large number of wild mares have contributed to the modern domestic breeds. The distribution of mtDNA-haplotypes around the world suggest an influx of wild mares from various regions into the domesticated horse. Some mtDNA-haplotypes have been found in DNA samples obtained from wild horses in prehistoric deposits, while other mtDNA-haplotypes have only been found in domesticated horses, both from living individuals as well as archeological finds. The Exmoor Pony has a high frequency of pre-domestication mtDNA-haplotypes, but all these mtDNA-haplotypes are found all around the world. Currently, only DNA of three Irish archeological samples are available for the British Islands of which the only wild-horse is from before the last ice age when all horses disappeared from the British Islands. Although wild-horses were abundant after the last ice-age, the lack of more pre-domestication DNA samples from the British Islands makes it impossible to determine the contribution of the wild horses of the British Islands to the local breeds, including the Exmoor pony, until more samples have been analyzed.

Let me know what you think, feel free to fix the citations, I have been lazy in them.-- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 02:50, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I'll let TPC comment, but I'm wondering if we also need to add some of this material on Y-DNA to the domestication article (I think there is some in there from the last time we took a whack at it...) Oh, and should the above say "y-DNA" rather than y-chromosome?? Montanabw^(talk) 05:38, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Montana, I really need to rewrite that article again.-- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 13:05, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

See below :o) Missing link? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:49, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

No, wishful thinking. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 13:05, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Why is that wishful thinking? I'm not saying they were Exmoors, of course - just that we had horses in Britain at around 3500 BC. It fills the gap a bit between the end-of-ice-age horses, and the 1600BC ones. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 13:37, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, the presense of wild horses over the age in Great Britain is not an issue. The land bridge after the last ice age existed till at least 6000 BC [1], so that explains wild horses in the UK. You are making far more of the archeological finds than that they are and if there is something to it, the relevance to the Exmoor is lacking and it all feels more like trying to make a suggestion that maybe there is an ancient root for Exmoors because there were horse finds in Britain. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 15:38, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

All I'm really trying to say is that it's quite possible that the pre-historic ponies did NOT go extinct in Britain, as some have suggested, and that the modern-day Exmoors are quite possible a combination of modern input onto those prehistoric ponies, rather than the descendants purely of escapees from stocks brought over to England from the continent post-ice-age. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:20, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

And that is all nice speculation, for which no evidence exists. We are not in the business to say what is maybe possible, we are here to document what we know. Do you have a pdf copy of Yalden(?) because I cannot get my hands on it. Or maybe I didn't search hard enough.... -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus}

I don't have a copy of Yalden - maybe Richard does? (We also, of course, don't have any evidence to say that they were descended entirely from in-brought animals, as opposed to cross-breeding with local wild mares). ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 21:56, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Would it be OK, to add something along the lines of ""Although recent mtDNA research has uncovered many haplotypes in the Exmoor pony, there is one matriline which appears to spring from ancient roots, and to date this particular haplotype has not been isolated in any other breed or type in either ancient or modern mtDNA samples. It would, however, be premature to draw any inferences, at this point, as to whether or not this haplotype originated in ancient times in the British Isles, or as to how long this haplotype has been present in the Exmoor pony or its ancestors." (I suggested this somewhere else) to that information on the genetics? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:18, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, which haplotype has not been uncovered in other breeds? My check shows ALL haplotypes have been uncovered in other breeds, but I could be mistaken. But even if you are correct, that does not mean anything, because that unique haplotype could originate from anywhere, something we cannot check due to the lack of post-ice age mtDNA samples of wild horses from the British Islands. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 15:29, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

I think this one between the I1 and I2 clusters and the central node. Can't yet find anything to say that any breed apart from the Exmoors had that particular type. It doesn't help that they haven't given it its own letter/number in either of the studies! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 21:51, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Chamber Tomb Horse bones = about 3500 BC

I am spinning with glee now - I have just managed to dig (out of the rabbit hole, lol?!) a reliable source for horse bones having been found in archaeological investigations of the (Childe's) period III/IV chamber-tombs! Yaaaaaaayyyyyyyy! Soooooooo ...... this plonks horses in Southern Britain definitely into that period (defined as the change-over from hunter-gatherer to agricultural; Daniels says bones are probably of wild horses, though Wilfred Jackson has posited that by that time they may have begun to be domesticated). I have added this info (with citation) to the history section - Kim, your wording seems pretty OK, the only thing I'd question would be the pre-domestication haplotype (you know the one, that (2002) B/ (2010) I node, which I haven't yet seen anything other than the Exies having. Yup, they share other mtDNA haplotypes with other breeds, but nothing shares that one with them, from everything I have read. Nothiing to say it wasn't a recent introduction, but I feel we should mention that that particular haplotype does, to date, seem unique to the Exmoors. And, of course, what we need now is for someone to do mtDNA testing on the chamber-tomb bones! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:14, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Severn-Cotswold tomb dates the southern England chamber tombs to about 3500 BC. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:15, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

How about adding "mtDNA analysis of the chamber-tomb bones has not yet been done" to the genetics information? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:25, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

... and I think boat-building was a bit beyond them in those days! LOL! (Though I'm not sure that we could get away with saying "To the best of our knowledge to date, ocean-going vessels capable of carrying horses were not being built in the late stone age ..... "ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:34, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

[Edit conflict] Does this help much? From that date, these could be domesticated, and so could have been imported. We still have a gap, according to Yalden, from 9,970 to 4,170 BP (I got my sums backwards before though: it's a gap of about 4,000 years, much less than I said). In BC that's about 8,000 to 4,000, and so 3,500 BC doesn't actually shorten the gap. This is what Yalden actually says:

"The possible survival of the Tarpan [in Britain] through to recent times has a similar popular hold on the romantic imagination. We do, of course, have domestic horses, and it has been tempting to suppose that they might be derived, in part or entriely, from the original wild horses of Britain." He then has some stuff about anatomy, in which he mentions "such breeds as Exmoors" and notes that they are physically very like tarpan but do not have erect manes. He goes on: "It is very doubtful that they are anything other than feral domestic horses, and the apparently long gap in the fossil record through Mesolithic and early Neolithic times (between 9770 and 4170 b.p.) also argues for that explanation (Clutton Brock 1986). However, Grigson (1966, 1978) notes that odd teeth and bones do occur in archaeological sites that are in this gap; the apparent Neolithic specimens from Durrington Walls (Harcourt 1978) are one example. She [Grigson] remarks that the dating of those she has checked is rarely secure, but that horse remains occur frequently enough to leave some scope to the romantics."

He then notes that Britain was not separate from mainland Europe until about 7,200 BP (so about 5,200 BC), and also that the records from Denmark and Sweden are very similar to those in Britain, with the native mammal faunas of southern Sweden and southern Britain being identical (the separation of Sweden having happened at about the same time as that of Britain). I think he's suggesting that tarpan was already extinct in the whole of north-western Europe before the separation of Britain.

To show that wild tarpan survived in Britain after the separation at about 5,200 BC would need records after this but still firmly in the Mesolithic, so presumably well before the 3,500 BC of the Severn-Cotswold tomb. It would be very interesting to know if Grigson's "odd teeth and bones" have been dated more accurately since.

I do think we need to be very careful not to let our romantic desires colour our interpretation of facts, and not to introduce original research. We must only use interpretation from published sources. Richard New Forest (talk) 10:37, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Not so sure about the boat thing. There is a known British ocean-going boat from 1600 BC, but people certainly brought sheep (earliest record 5356 BP) and cattle (also Neolithic) long before this, and they must have crossed the Channel somehow. You don't actually need a very large boat to carry a pony: the Vikings of course managed fine with longships (there is of course no requirement for the pony to be right way up). Pretty well anything that could cross the channel could bring a pony. Richard New Forest (talk) 10:56, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

We do also have the Aurochs in Porlock - don't think anyone would have persuaded one of those onto a boat .... so I'd tend to take that as evidence that the large mammals didn't all go extinct as supposed at that time. And it's the only aurochs we have dating from that kind of period ... so why not horse bones, too? We just haven't found them yet (hadn't found that aurochs till very recently, either!) Why do we assume that the cattle and sheep were brought over, not domesticated here? Any particular reason for this one?

And I think it should be fair enough to point out that there are horse bones dating from around 3500 BC in the UK - otherwise we're virtually 'hiding' this fact. Doesn't mean we have to say anything specific about them, in relation to our modern breeds - just that horses were here in those times. I think it's possible to be overly-sceptical about horses of one sort or another (not necessarily tarpan) being continuously in Britain; I think going 'pro-extinction and domestic reintroduction' also isn't sufficiently backed up by the data we have yet. I think 'undecided one way or the other' is a better route, because to go from 'might have been domesticated' to 'probably were domesticated' is a bit too big a leap. (A bit too close to straying off into OR in the opposite direction, too!) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 13:47, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Sheep have never been native in Britain, so there's no doubt that they were brought by people. Likewise goats.

Richard, dear heart, I can personally 'down' a sheep or goat single-handedly and hold it pinned for quite some time, lol! Have done so on many occasions; but I can't do the same thing to even a Shetland pony! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:20, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Aurochs do seem to have survived in Britain until Neolithic times as wild animals. However, although domestic cattle are of course domesticated aurochs, all the evidence points to the domestication of taurine cattle having happened in the Middle East and not in Britain – for example, in the Middle East there is a gradual reduction in size of cattle bones, but in Britain there are aurochs and domestic cattle with no overlap in size, which suggests no domestication and not even much interbreeding (aurochs really were very much bigger than domestic cattle). This means that domestic cattle must have been brought by people in Neolithic times. Richard New Forest (talk) 20:56, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Also, to my view, 3500 BC definitely counts as 'pre-historic' horse (of one kind or another) Just had another thought - our description of Tarpans comes from the observations of Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1774 - 4000 years after the chamber-tomb bones. Who's to say that the tarpan's mane hadn't changed from laying-over to more upright during those 4000 years? And the 1774 tarpans can't have the same claim to being prehistoric that the 3500 BC chamber tomb bones have, surely? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 14:26, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, we have two different sets of data here that we are discussing. One is data related to the Exmoor, which should be in this article and I have written out. The second data set are archeological finds that show horses were in the UK at specific times. The latter dataset only supports that we have horses in the UK, and without a specific link between those and the Exmoor, they do not provide anything beyond the statement that there were wild horses in Britain after the last Ice Age.

Take a look at Dun Devonshire pony cave painting. (search for 'Devonshire' - it's the easiest way to get to it. I'm now trying to track down a date for the original cave painting! ... No good, leapt too soon, prey got away! I will go find the book instead!ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 09:24, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

I think the dun "Devonshire" was an actual (presumably) Exmoor that Darwin drew, not a cave painting. Don't stripes turn up quite regularly in Exmoors? Richard New Forest (talk) 22:53, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Yerze, I gathered that Darwin had drawn that one; wondered whether he'd copied it from British Cave art. As for stripes in Exies, no, there's no dun gene in the Exies at all, so no stripes. They are uniformly homozygous seal-brown and pangare, with no other dilutions. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 11:18, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

It seems that the dun Devonshire pony was one Darwin saw in the flesh, and it's mentioned in On the Origin of Species. It's not in the first edition (1859: [2]), but it's there by the 1872 edition ([3]), so presumably he saw it sometime between the two. There is very little cave art known in Britain – I think only the recently discovered carvings at Cresswell Crags are known. Richard New Forest (talk) 20:29, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Domestication

Proof of domestication is a really difficult thing, and speculation of someone that they maybe were starting to domesticate them should be treated with extreme caution. Remember, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, especially considering that the earliest proof of domestication of the horse in the area where we have a lot of evidence is from around 3500 BC.

The Tarpan had short erect manes, and the individuals claimed to be Tarpans with long manes come from a area where local would let their mares roam free so there is no way of knowing for sure they were wild horses. The original scientific description is based on a lay-man's description made in the Ukraine I belief of a herd that is definitely wild and they have short manes.

We cannot just dump all kind of Exmoor-unrelated horse trivia in the article. I think there is no objection to create an article about the History of the Horse in the British Islands to give this information a place, but trying to insert this unrelated info into the Exmoor article is not okay.-- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 16:01, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I think that's a sensible suggestion. Richard New Forest (talk) 20:56, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I am sorry for the whole sale reversal at first because an ancient speculation of really really early domestication in an area where we have hardly any evidence of horse presence, especially in light of what we know now about the spread of the domesticated horse over the continent and when they were domesticated, is really not done. We know now that there is a single Y-chromosome, so, we need that stallion first. Most prewalskii horses don't accept a halter so suggesting that those ancient horse were tamed is hard to belief. The idea of the single Y-chromosome is that it took an exceptional stallion that was tamable in the first place and for that reason, domesticated horses cannot arrive in Britain before they are found in mainland Europe, which occurred around 2000 BCE. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 16:38, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

IMHO, I don't see that a brief summary of horse history in general is a problem, as long as there are proper caveats that this isn't necessarily breed X, Y, or Z, particularly when we have to address widely held beliefs about the antiquity of a breed. Dana had to do this a lot at Sorraia, where there is a widespread belief that they are really "wild", but not the case. We hit both the myths and the fallacies head-on at Arabian horse, which is a breed that has a bigger dose of utterly romantic nonsense and other inaccurate beliefs than any of them (I can say this, I own some...). I do think there is also a place for a new article, such as the History of the horse in South Asia. So I think a little "here's how old horses are in England" isn't necessarily a bad thing in this article, with a wikilink to the proposed article. Montanabw^(talk) 21:12, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I am all for the idea of a History of the Horse in Britain article - seems like a superb idea, pure genius. And we could then link from all the British breeds to the History of the Horse article for people who want more background reading on the whole idea. I am quite happy to go on digging into the 'ancient horse' material that I've already uncovered, plus trying to drag as much more out of that rabbit warren as possible, in order to get some really good material and sources for an article like that.

Richard, I think Yalden managed to get my back up by referring to "everyone-who-didn't-think-like-him" as 'Romantics', lol! I absolutely hate being labelled ... particularly in any way that suggests that I'm not analytical, objective, or scientifically-minded! (Just let me at Yalden, in some nice, quiet, dark alleyway, and I'll show him what a 'romantic' I am .... not serious, of course :o) ) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:37, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

And, with the whole 'domestication' thing, we're back again to the point that all domesticated horses, wherever they may be, are descended ultimately from wild ones (via Stallion #1, or "Mr Nerd", as Montana calls him - love that name!). Domesticated horses were not 'created' as domesticated. Quite likely that Mr Nerd had a 'domesticate-able gene(s)', and that's why he and his sons turn up everywhere. Does anyone know of the earliest trace of equines with laying-over manes? The thick, laying-over mane has clear survival advantages for animals in cold, high-rainfall areas, as the mane acts as a water run-off device, preventing water from soaking into the top of the neck and causing massive chilling and stuff like rain-scald (you never get rain scald underneath a natural, untrimmed mane). Obviously hypothetical stuff here - but ice ages are dry times, and it seems likely that the massively-increased rainfall (particularly along the continental borders, close to oceans) in the post-ice-age period would sensibly have given an advantage to those animals whose mane acted as a water run-off, which would explain why the inland-continental (steppe) animals didn't need it, as mid-continent areas have nothing like the same amount of rainfall as the ocean-edges do. So no reason against (and a strong reason for) animals in the Iberian area, north-west Europe, coastal France, coastal Africa etc. developing laying-over manes as an adaptation (OK, you know what I mean - survival of those most fit) to a 'much higher rainfall' climate. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:53, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

There is no evidence that long manes ever occurred in wild horses. Evolution does not require something to evolve when it is beneficial in some way. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 15:33, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

So when did the first laid-over mane appear - and why? Surely not as a result of domestication? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 17:51, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually, yes, domestication has a slew of effects, and that is how we can tell whether a species gets dometicated. Increase hair length of some type is a general one. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 18:01, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

So you don't think that it's just one of the ways that equines evolved as climate changed - in the same way that the cold-weather ponies have shorter legs (making for less heat loss, as it gives them a higher volume to surface area ratio), and the frost-caps on cold-weather animals' tails, and the insulative extra-woolly undercoat and waterproof top-coat they grow in the winter, and so on? (In the same kind of way that you suggested that the 'primitive haplotype' that some of the Exies have could have been around in another breed one single individual was crossed with the Exmoors) ..... if the haplotype (in this example, giving them rain-shedding manes) has some advantage for the local population, in the years that followed, it easily could have grown to be the dominant haplotype? I would have thought that it was more likely that the rain-spout manes gave the high-rainfall-area animals a survival advantage, over time, so the ones that were more 'waterproof' were the ones more likely to survive and breed. :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 21:31, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Again, extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence. I can dream up at least 25 other if then stories, but if you can find evidence that the horse defies the general pattern of domestication by having long manes, please share it with us. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 22:37, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

I am really not trying to annoy you (please don't be annoyed!); I was just thinking it was the same kind of thing as the tail changing from / being different to the donkey/zebra type 'tail with fly swat at end' to the 'all-long-haired' tail. From what I remember of the Przewalski's they have a tail sort of part way between the donkey-type and pony-type tails. And the same kind of thing as the Siberian tigers having thicker, longer coats than the Indian tigers, and the snow leopards having thicker, longer coats than the hot-country leopards, and so on. Nothing special to horses, just a general adaptation to a different habitat. It seems almost as if you are saying that the only reason for the long mane is domestication - but then how did the lion develop a long-haired mane? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:02, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

I am not annoyed. What we know about wild horses is that they had short manes. So yes, adaptations took place in other species but without evidence in the horse, we have nothing. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 00:31, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I understand that - but it would be a little strange if the horse were the only species in which adaptations didn't take place as a natural occurrence! The whole history of the horse, from hyracotherium onwards, is one of continually adapting to changes in the environment, after all. Bearing that it mind, it just seemed to me to be a common-sense view that the rain-shedding mane was just another in a long series of adaptations and developments, and I think, again, that it would be a big jump from 'the domestication of animals sometimes results in longer hair growth' to 'long manes in horses were most probably the result of domestication'. I think, again, that it's straying a bit towards OR in the other direction - so best not to put something along those lines into the article. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 04:53, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

"Taming" ... not really relevant, but from my own experience with 'wild-behaving' Forest mares is that they are far less defensive about their backs than they are about their heads. For example, my 14 yo buckskin Forest mare goes absolutely ape if you try to halter her (and I mean really, really dangerously ape!), but was perfectly happy to be sat on in our pound'n'chute set-up at home - no probs, food bucket + someone on back ... why worry? ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 08:38, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Extinction Claim

Not happy with the assertion that wild horses definitely went extinct in Britain at all. I don't think we can realistically say that they definitely did, bearing in mind the archaeology that we do have (i.e. non-domesticated horse remains after separation from continental Europe). One of the citations mentions them going extinct in Ireland (not the whole of Britain), and I can't access the other as it requires a login. I think that assertion probably needs to be removed, or at least stated as controversial; I will try a re-wording. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 23:39, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

The 'extinction claim' came back while I was asleep (for all of three hours, lol!) I think it's far better to 'teach the controversy' than to go all-out for a definite 'horses went extinct' claim, in the light of the fact that remains of wild horses pre-dating domestication and post-dating island separation have clearly been found. It allows the 'went extinct' point of view some coverage, without giving it undue weight. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 05:24, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I think it's important to remember that Britain wasn't completely covered in ice, too. See the Sheffield University maps of the extent of ice-sheet cover. And I will have to track the reference down again (it may be one of those that Montana is hunting down for me), but hoof prints from the last ice age have been found in the Severn Estuary, not many miles from what is now the north coast of Exmoor. This part of Britain was not under ice - and perfectly graze-able by ice-age equines. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 06:46, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

We also have (just found it) wild horse bone from Gough's Cave (in Cheddar, Somerset, so again, not very far from modern Exmoor) dating to around 7150 BC. Again, I'm not saying it was an Exmoor pony! All I'm saying is that we did have wild horses, in that area of Britain, post-ice-age and pre-domestication, so I think it would be fair(ish) to infer that ponies have wandered about in the 'Exmoor area' for many thousands of years. When I get around to starting work on the 'History of Horses in Britain' article, I shall plot all the finds, with their ages, onto a map :o) ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:45, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

There are two era's we are talking about, the sure extinction during the ice age proper (>10,000 BP) and the possible extinction after that between 8000 and 3500 BP or so. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 12:20, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Mustang advocates tried this angle for years in the USA, before giving it up completely and now simply argue that modern feral horses are a "reintroduced" species. My thinking is that we should definitely take all this stuff, in whatever form, to the proposed horse history in the UK article and for the Exmoors, stick to what can be specifically verified about the breed itself. Frustrating, I know -- I had to endure similar scales falling from my eyes about my beloved Arabians, and at the end of the day, I still love 'em! And in that breed's wikipedia article, we at least got to keep a fun "myths and legends" section. (Apparently they didn't condense out of the west wind by the hand of Allah, after all). But did have one spat with someone quite unhappy that I declared the Al Khamsa a myth, who went off and wrote their own (really poor) article (which I am avoiding totally). Montanabw^(talk) 20:38, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

End-Pleistocene Catastrophe?

http://www.atlantisquest.com/Paleontology.html

A mass, world-wide catastrophic event could have resulted in near-extinction, as well as mass-actual-extinction, of all sorts of stuff, and if this happened (a lot of archaeological evidence for something dramatic), then it could explain the paucity of remains from the Holocene for all sorts of ancient British fauna. (and, going way-offbeat .... an ancient folklore-memory to explain the Noah's Flood story, lol! ???) I'm not an Atlantis-theorist myself, but turned up this ancient bone page in my digging for stuff in the rabbit-warren. ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 10:18, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Sandbox

I'm moving the ancient and prehistoric stuff here, for two reasons: 1) Has lotsa cn tags and is disputed, so sitting here to be preserved until we get it sorted out; but 2) Also not necessarily Exmoor-specfic, so it may need to go into the new proposed article. I'm going to play with adding some verbiage into the main article that will satisfy no one for now... Montanabw^(talk) 22:32, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

---

Some sources suggest that wild horses went extinct from the British Islands during the last Ice Age, but then recolonized England but not Ireland once the ice retreated. However, bones of wild horses have been found in chamber tombs dating to 3500 BC, , after the separation of the British Isles from continental Europe, but before domestication, and further horse remains dating from approximately 8000 BC have been located at Seamer Carr, Flixton, Uxbridge , Thatcham and King Arthur's Cave, with more remains dating from the paleolithic / mesolithic transitional period found at Robin Hood's Cave and Mother Grundy's Parlour. These finds suggest that horses did not go extinct; they were free to migrate back and forth across the land bridge until the sea level rose, at which time there was a population of them in the now-isolated islands.

OK, What I've done

I went in and took a whack at the article, rearranged a bunch of stuff and tried to "Teach the controversy" by explaining both sides. If I screwed stuff up, just slap me or something ! (grin) I hope you all are basically OK with the rewrite. I also redid that one paragraph on the 1086-1920 period because it was too close a paraphrase from Dent and Hendricks. Overall, here's my take: Kim, we gotta talk a little bit about the generic domestication stuff because it's obvious that we are skewering a beloved sacred cow here. So even if it is scientifically irrelevant, we need it. (Just like the Arabian article has to explain about the Al Khamsa myth) Pesky: You're just gonna to have to let go of the prehistoric origins stuff, at least until they analyze mtDNA of Exmoors against pre-domestication sources, which is apt to happen on the 12th of Never unless someone like the Exmoor Society or the Equus survival trust puts up the money. It just does not add up. I'll let Richard weigh in on the geology of the British Isles, as my understanding of that is nil, but I can tell you that based on what I know about the extinction of the horse in the Americas, I'm not going to buy the Hendricks/Dent claim that they all got to the UK via Alaska 100K years ago and have been pure ever since. The Andalusian people like to claim something like that for their horses too, (Pure from the caves of Lascaux, I think in their case) even in the face of DNA evidence that they crossed with the Barb! The "our breed is the really unique pure wild one" appears to be horse pucky everywhere it's turned up. I'm never saying never, but I'm just saying... Montanabw^(talk) 01:00, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I think you did a fine job. I fiddles around a bit as I think we should not do to much detail about DNA before we introduce the concepts better. I think that the pre-historic DNA of British samples is just a matter of time, and once that is there, it will be easy to determine the degree of influx of native wild mares into the breed. The pre-ice age Irish sample shares the mtDNA with the exmoor, but it is also found in mares from China. I would be more inclined to believe there might be a substantial influx of wild British mares if they would have at least one unique haplotype, but the extended list of samples (the full list that is available, not just the once used for the networks) makes clear they do not have something unique in that sense. -- Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 01:42, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I tweaked your wording, I think I'm still saying what you meant. Montanabw^(talk) 05:55, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

You did great :o) That's terrific stuff. I now have the History of the Horse in Britain Sandbox up and running, with a few starters in it - please come and play in it! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 11:22, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not obsessively 'Exies are prehistoric', actually - I'm just 'prehistoric horses were in Britain post-Ice Age and almost certainly had a major input into our modern British breeds'. And, of course, my beloved Foresters are just out-and-out mongrels, really! They have had so much input from so many sources over the years .... Arabs, TBs, Welshies, Highlands, Exmoor, Dartmoor - in short, you name it! ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 11:30, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I think you are probably correct that mares had input, for sure. But as for the rest, some folks sure are obsessed! Everything Exmoor had 'em "purebred" at 140,000 years old and Hendricks said 100K (One reason Hendricks drives me a little nuts, comprehensive, but takes all claims at face value, no independent analysis.) Montanabw^(talk) 18:25, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

? verification needed

A tag saying "verification needed" has been added to ref 19 (Budd, Jackie (1998), Horse and pony breeds, Gareth Stevens, ISBN 9780836820461) after the sentence "British and Roman chariots pulled by ponies phenotypically similar to the Exmoor, have been found in Somerset". I don't have access to the book - could someone who has do the check - or explain what is needed?— Rod ^talk 11:51, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Question both the colour 'brown' and the status 'feral'

I edited it once to remove the word feral and change the word brown to bay but see that both have been returned. I suggest a reading of the wiki article for the equine colour 'brown' where it becomes (hopefully) obvious that the Exmoor pony is not 'nearly always' or even 'usually' brown by the modern definition of the word although you will still see it called brown in British articles because the british haven't caught up yet and are using out of date material. It is also never dun, what is described as dun by british people is in fact buckskin. I have been on Exmoor and seen these ponies at close quarters thousands of times and have only once or twice seen one that I might call seal brown if I didn't know better and have NEVER seen a dun , just endless dark bays and sooty buckskins (and once this year a perlino). They are also most emphatically NOT feral anymore than the cows and sheep who are also up there. Feral or semi feral implies escaped and living freely as if wild; they do NOT do this.Although they have a lot of land to roam about on, they are all owned and managed by someone and are kept in herds within boundaries just like the cows and sheep. Obviously I'm not providing any cross referencing here as my assertions are based on first hand observation . — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pandderian (talk • contribs) 22:03, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Source material is always helpful for footnotes. As for "brown," there is actually a great big (but friendly) pissing match on this across the wiki horse articles, though mostly a friendly one. Basically, I agree that "brown" is, genetically, usually a dark bay. However, there has been a genetic test developed for a variant of bay called seal brown, and so what we are trying to do is, basically, link to the bay article where "brown" appears to be misused for bays in general, but to the seal brown article where the horses in question appear to have the seal brown characteristics of lighter brown muzzle and eyes, etc. (There is also pangare, but that's a different genetic mechanism all together). I'll let the Brits here comment on the dun/buckskin thing ( though you are probably correct) because undoubtably there are horse politics in this and I have really had i with the stupid edit wars that have been going on at WPEQ -- those who care can fight this one. In the feral case, I think that semi-feral probably fits, even if owned, but again, I'll let the people who are there comment further. Montanabw^(talk) 21:10, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Hehe! Your friendly UK-local pony person here! Exmoors are homozygous for pangare, always EE, never have cream gene (so no buckskins), don't seem to have had the dun gene for many, many decades (if ever), and to the best of my knowledge haven't (yet) been tested to see if they are AA +homozygous sooty, or A^t. My suspicion, based on phenotype, is that they are A^t + homozygous pangare, which would definitely account for the colouring (homozygous pangare on seal-agouti will give you the very dark body coat plus the pale beige mealying-out of the otherwise red-tan muzzles, etc., on the typical non-pangare seal brown coat). They're definitely not feral, they are semi-feral, all privately owned, and some outrunning on the moor (along with various other breeds also running out there). Does all that help? Pesky (talk) 09:22, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Wish they could just pull DNA and settle it. I don't think there yet is a sooty test. Montanabw^(talk) 19:34, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Heh! Me, too! AFAIK, sooty, pangare and flaxen haven't yet been mapped. I'm prepared to bet a bunch that flaxen will turn out to be on ECA6, though. And also prepared to bet a bunch that sooty will turn out to have a proven link to sugar-tyrosine metabolism processes. Pesky (talk) 07:44, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Tarpans

All that stuff on Tarpan links is quite dubious. There's a lot more updated material out there. We've discussed claims of primitiveness before, and the Tarpan was a pretty distinct central European creature, unlikely to have any actual impact on British ponies, IMHO. Almost every single breed we've worked up wiki articles for has claims to ancient wild ancestors to bolster purity claims, and most are unprovable (I laughed my butt off at the claims that the Andalusian is a pure descendant from the horses painted in Lascaux. Anyone ever work with Zebras or Przewalski's? Undomesticatable, even the tame ones would just as soon take your head off as look at you! =;-O ) All that said, I'm open to further discussion tho... Montanabw^(talk) 19:53, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Hehe! I looked very closely at that genetic study; from what I saw it does seem to support this idea. Point me at the more recent stuff, please, so I can take a proper look at all of it. Of course, all the Brit ponies are (originally) the same roots as the mainland European animals, because for much of its history the ancient Briton peninsula was part of the European mainland. We haz horse remains dating back to 700,000 BC, and all that other fossil-record stuff I dug up for History of the horse in Britain. AFAIK, there isn't any other primitive candidate for the prehistoric descent of the British ponies. An awful lot must depend on how we define "Tarpan". Has anyone ever suggested a proto-tarpan, for example? What came before the Tarpan? I'm not (and the study wasn't) suggesting any purity of descent, just that the Exmoor was by far the closest genetic match to the Tarpan DNA. I'll remove that last sentence from that paragraph. We need Kim! And I obsessively want any and every genetic study which has involved any of the British native pony breeds in comparison with ancient DNA analysis ;P I'm obsessed ... Pesky (talk) 07:38, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Okie-dokes; we have fossil remains around 50,000 years old at Kent's Cavern (very close to Exmoor), and also in the Bristol Channel (part of which is the north Exmoor coast). I've requested a full copy of this via Ironholds aka User:Okeyes (WMF), as I know he was the liaison dealing with the Royal Society, in order to get some dates on the subfossil tracks there. What does anyone (reliable source!) call the prehistoric British ponies? Were they Tarpans? If not, what were they? (Bearing in mind the DNA studies, lol!) Pesky (talk) 09:00, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

I think you nailed it; and do we even have DNA from the actual Tarpan subspecies? I don't think so (?) We have some Przewalski DNA to look at, and there are interesting studies there. But what IS in a name? The point is that the primitive wild horse was not necessarily a "Tarpan," and the only Tarpans of the named subspecies surviving into modern times were nasty bastards that could never be domesticated; why people think they want their animals to trace to them is a mystery to me! Montanabw^(talk) 20:17, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

I'm being brain-dead ... it was a morphological study, not a DNA study. Close, but no cigar, as they say! Still the results showed a much closer wossname between the Exies and the Tarpans than any other two breeds / races / thingies studied ... I think Tarpan, for a lot of people, is a blanket term for the primitive western-European horse. Oh, and the Salutré horse, of course. What were they, anyways? What we need is a blanket term to cover the mainland-Europe prehistoric horse, other than just Equus ferus. Yeh, people have come up with a lorra, lorra names ... [Equus caballus ferus (Boddaert, 1785), Equus equiferus Pallas, 1811, Equus sylvestris Brincken, 1828, Equus ferus sylvestris (Brincken, 1828), Equus caballus sylvestris (Brincken, 1828), Equus gmelini Antonius, 1912, Equus ferus gmelini (Antonius, 1912), Equus caballus gmelini (Antonius, 1912), and Equus gmelini silvatica Vetulani, 1927, Equus tarpan Pidoplichko, 1951..... take your pick] I grabbed that from here, where those are all given as alternative names for the Tarpan / tarpan / wild horse. Anyhow, everything there was was just landraces ;P Adding: tarpan DNA? Must be some about; I think there's a stuffed Tarpan somewhere, and plenty of bones available. Pesky (talk) 01:08, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

"Ancient" or "ancestral" wild horse works well enough, I think. I'd say that the primitive horse characteristics are pretty standard, really; the wild horse phenotype sort of had to be built a certain way to survive most northern hemisphere climate zones without aid of humans. As for taxonomy, this is definitely a Kim vd Linde question and much has changed since the 50s. I've dropped her a note to look in here. For more see the talk page of the Tarpan article, there have been a ton of discussions about this all over WP. As of now, I think domestication of the horse is currently pretty state of the art. We added much on new research when we were upgrading what has become the History of horse domestication theories article (which was a heated battle involving our old friend JLAN). Also note talk pages and articles for Sorraia, Canadian Rustic Pony, which claim ancient wild horse roots too, and (my favorite) early on, the reference sources for the Andalusian claimed that breed was descended in an unbroken strain from the Lascaux cave horses, because they so obviously looked ALIKE! (**Snort coffee out nose**). Montanabw^(talk) 18:20, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

WRT the Solutre horse, here's a quote from User:Tsaag Valren (originally from Talk:Trait du Nord): "The term "Solutré horse" refers to the bones of prehistoric horses found near the Rock of Solutré in the late nineteenth century. This discovery caused a hypothesis (now widely questioned), that Paleolithic hunters guided herds of wild horses up the rock to rush into the void and kill them. More recent research attributed the bones of horses found in Solutré to sub-species close to the modern horse : Equus caballus germanicus, Equus caballus gallicus and Equus caballus arcelini. From a scientific point of view, the Solutré horse is no longer considered as distinct species." I think she (Tsaag) has done quite a bit of research into the ancient roots of French horses, so she might be a good person to talk to. Dana boomer (talk) 19:54, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want .... someone to include DNA from the various fossil finds from England, into the ancient-and-modern DNA studies. We have horse bones available with all sorts of dates on them (and apparently two species of horse bones at one site), going right back to 700,000 years ago. Why on Earth hasn't anyone used some of that material? It would be so interesting! I'm not fussed one way or the other about the Exies, but I wanna know! Just for the sake of knowing ... Pesky (talk) 16:34, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

small exclusively-Exie node from Jansen et al. study

Adding: As far as I can tell, in terms of species, we're looking at the same basic species (and probably subspecies, too, in "real" terms) for everything pre-modern / late-prehistoric with the exception of Przewalski's horse. Loadsa landraces, but interbreedable compatibility, etc. I'm much more interested in how it all splits up into the various haplotypes and so on, which is why I'd really like someone to be getting some DNA from the prehistoric Ancient British Pony, just so's I can (internally) map out how the relationships work, and how the Asturcón and Pottock and Merens and all fit in, in comparison to Ancient British Pony haplotype(s). I suppose I could end up having to "poke" someone at Uppsala or somewhere, to make them do it! I "poked" plenty of people about the agouti thing, and we finally got an A^t allele identified.

I want a decent comparison and explanation and study and all on that small exclusively-Exie node in this diagram from the Jansen et al. study. That's a very ancient-origin node, there, with Fjords'n'stuff descended from it (in mtDNA terms). I wanna know how that little bunch ties in.

And, about aging of types etc., Jansen et al. say " ...300,000 y approximately represents the latest possible date for the first modern caballine horse." Pesky (talk) 05:13, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Update: I've emailed Gabriella Lindgren at Uppsala and pointed her in the direction of ancient equine bone samples from the UK ;P Pesky (talk) 08:44, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Article title

Shouldn't the title of this article be "Exmoor pony" rather than "Exmoor Pony"? Malleus Fatuorum 21:06, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

I would have thought so. Even the first line of the article puts it that way.RafikiSykes (talk) 21:37, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

If nobody objects in the next day or so I'll request an admin to make the move. Malleus Fatuorum 22:09, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Long story and I have no opinion here, actually. Per WP's usual capitalization guidelines, we have articles such as Arabian horse where the word "horse" is not necessary to the title, people in the horsey world just call them "Arabians." On the other hand, we have American Quarter Horse where we DO deliberately capitalize the word "horse" because nobody ever calls the breed "Quarters." The ponies are more problematic, as "pony" is often an integral part of their breed name so as to distinguish them from horses, but not always -- everyone knows that a "Shetland" is a Shetland pony. Yet we also have, for example, [[Hackney horse)] and Hackney pony, very separate breeds. And then people sometimes fight over if a breed is a horse or a pony. None of which is relevant here, just a caution if going about and doing mass fixes, be cautious because it's a landmine for some breeds. Montanabw^(talk) 05:33, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

I only came to this article because it was linked from New Forest pony, which I was doing a GA review on. I've got absolutely no intention of mass fixing anything, just this one article. I'm aware that capitalisation of animal names in general is a complete mess, but it's not a mess I intend to set foot in. Malleus Fatuorum 11:29, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, capitalization fights are among the biggest wastes of time around here. But then, I'm part-German, so maybe the love of the capital letter is a hereditary problem. (ha) Montanabw^(talk) 01:42, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

IveAlwaysThoughtGermansShouldWriteInCamelCase, personally ;P Pesky (talk) 08:57, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

• Given that there appear to be no objections I've now asked for this page to be moved. Malleus Fatuorum 15:47, 16 May 2012 (UTC)