Managing donkey and horse resources following the collapse of the Roman Empire in France

Alongside horses, donkeys represent a member of the horse family, well-known for their economic, social and ritual importance in proto-historic France.

Traditionally, horses and donkeys have provided humankind with complementary services, not only enhancing our capacity to travel well above our own speed, but also to transport heavy loads across rugged landscapes and to improve farming yields.

However, the entire history of horse and donkey management remains difficult to reconstruct based on textual, iconographic and archaeological evidence.

The sequence of ancient DNA molecules preserved in archaeological remains has recently provided a new, complementary historical source, considerably advancing our capacity to track the numbers, types and movements of domestic animals in the past, and therefore, to unravel changing herding management practices through time.

PostEquus will apply state-of-the-art approaches in ancient horse genomics and develop an innovative genotyping solution for the domestic donkey, to generate an unprecedented corpus of genomic data to assess the phenotypic and genetic diversity of both species in the past history of France.

By genetically profiling horses and donkeys from the collapse of the Roman Empire (6th century CE to the 18th century CE), PostEquus will reveal the whole breadth of equine management strategies and their evolution in the face of major societal crises and invasions.