Tarpans were not wild horses. They were just feral horses, scientific research has shown
For decades, the tarpan has appeared in zoological literature as Europe’s last wild horse. Modern research has shown, however, that the tarpan was only a feral type of domesticated horse, or perhaps a crossbreed of domestic and wild horses. This is documented by scientific studies from recent years.
“The tarpan has traditionally been described as a grey-coloured horse in the literature. Only genetic analyses of archaic DNA from bones dating back thousands of years old published in 2009 revealed that the grey coat was a mistake. Samples of dozens of wild horses of Pleistocene and Holocene age from the Iberian Peninsula through Central and Eastern Europe as far as Siberia showed that wild horses were originally bay. More specifically, the coat was in shades of brown, while the mane, tail and lower parts of the limbs were black,” explains Miloslav Jirku from the Biological Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
The observations of Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin, who watched a herd of horses near the Russian town of Voronezh in 1769, became the main source for the tarpan description. According to the botanist and traveller, the animals were mouse-coloured; however, white and grey animals were also present in the herd, with grey being considered typical for wild horses by Gmelin. However, Gmelin himself mentioned the strong influence of domesticated horses in his description.
Some critically-minded scientists subsequently questioned the conclusions of Gmelin and other authors on the original grey colouring. In 1841, for example, Colonel H. Smith suggested that travellers mentioning horses with a greyish colour and an upright mane since ancient times were actually describing feral donkeys. “But these critical views remained in the minority for many decades, and information about grey-coloured tarpans prevailed in most references particularly since the 1930s,” notes Dalibor Dostal, director of the conservation organization European Wildlife.
Only modern analyses of archaic DNA finally showed that this was a mistake. The proverbial “nail in the coffin” came in the form of a comparative morphological analysis of the only two preserved skulls of Russian tarpans and 83 specimens of different breeds of horses. In one case, it appeared to be the skull of a domestic horse; in the other case, it was at best a cross-breed with a domestic horse, which the authors concluded by stating that the tarpan did not meet the criteria for being classified as a separate species.
The name, i.e., the tarpan, is also a relatively new and non-indigenous term for wild horses in Europe. For thousands of years, the simple and unambiguous term “wild horse” had been used on the Old Continent” for purebred, undomesticated solipeds. It was only in the mid-19th century that the term “tarpan” began to appear. It was used by Asian merchants who traded with Ukraine via Central Asia.
Originally, they used it to refer to light-weight wild or, rather, feral horses from the Central Asia region. In the period literature, tarpans are also referred to as ancestors of fast Arabian horses and described in contrast to the smaller and more robust European horse. Only later was the term tarpan applied to the last wild horses surviving in Europe.
Doubts over whether the tarpan was a real wild horse were raised in the literature for decades. A number of authors pointed out that tarpans were more like domesticated horses or their cross-breeds. Some of them called the tarpan a myth from the very beginning, one that never existed as a biological species, arguing that it involved feral animals, probably cross-breeds of Mongolian and Arabian horses. As early as 1888, Professor Carl Vogt described the tarpan as “a degenerated horse from Asia”.
So, based on the findings of modern research, scientists are beginning to return to the initial name, i.e., the “wild horse”. “The description of the wild ancestor of the domesticated horse, i.e., the species Equus ferus, is formally invalid. Consequently, major discoveries of recent years will have to be taken into account in the future, and the wild horse E. ferus re-described as a biological species based on a European, or, Eurasian wild horse not affected by domestication,” concludes Jirku.
In addition, the tarpan myth has given rise to two breeds of horses. The greyish Polish horse (Konik) and the German Heck horse were to be a reconstruction of the exact appearance of Europe’s native wild horses, making them, at present, a vivid reminder of the mistake of some scientists that took root in the literature for decades.
