Equus – August 2019

For a long time, scholars speculated
about the spotted horses of Pech
Merle. Ice Age humans painted many
horses---1,250 have been documented
in caves from Spain into eastern Russia
---but all others where coat colors can
be identifi ed are black, brown, bay,
grullo or dun. Indeed, in this time
before domestication, it was believed,
these were the only equine coat colors
that existed. With the assumption
that the Pech Merle artists could not
have seen real leopard-spotted horses,
explanations for their paintings ranged
from hallucinations to artistic license.
In 2011, however, Stanford University
researchers offered another possibility:
The artists may have been simply
painting what they saw. Their genetic
analysis showed that four of 10 horses

1296 : “Grooms

and Horses,”

from the Yuan

Dynasty in

China;

ink and color

on paper

Artist: Zhao

Mengfu

1650 : “Landscape

With Two Horses,”

Dutch, oil on panel

Artist: Nicolaes

Pieterszoon

Berchem

TH

E^ N

AT

ION

AL^

GA

LLE

RY

OF

DE

NM

AR

K

ME

TR

OP

OL

ITA

N^ M

US

EU

M^

OF

AR

T,^

NE

W^ Y

OR

K/G

IFT

OF

JO

HN

M.

CR

AW

FO

RD

,^ J

R.,

19

88

AUTUMN 2019 EQUUS 498 71

they sampled from Pleistocene Europe

carried the LP gene, while none of the

six Siberian samples from the same

period had it. LP is the leopard complex

gene, which can produce leopard

spotting, white blankets with spotting,

and other color patterns we now

associate mainly with Appaloosas and a

few other breeds.

Headlines in the popular press in

November 2011 made declarations like,

“Spotted Horses in Cave Art Weren’t

Just a Figment, DNA Shows” (The

New York Times) and “Cave Paintings