Dappled Horses

From the sophistication of William Hogarth to ancient European cave art. London Art News gets around, doesn't it? Dappled horses like these in the Pech Merle Cave in France have been known for years, but DNA evidence to support their realism has only just been discovered. A German team investigated the fossil DNA of 31 European horses, from Siberia to the Iberian Peninsula. They found that six of the animals carried a mutation that causes modern horses to have white and black spots. So, dappled horses roamed Europe 25,000 years ago and cave artists depicted them accurately. Note the human hands above the horses. Are these signs of ownership? Did we domesticate horses much earlier than previously thought?