Posted on 7 November 2011
Some authors had argued that the leopard like spots seen on many horses found in cave paintings were drawn from the imagination, perhaps a mind-altered state. An international team of scientists including and have confounded earlier interpretations, their research, published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a surprisingly high number of horses were spotted. The team speculate that the homozygote for the spotting gene are night-blind, which may have been a disadvantage, leading to a decline in the number of this colour variant.
PNAS doi: 10.1073/pnas.1108982108 Genotypes of predomestic horses match phenotypes painted in Paleolithic works of cave art