The global spread of Oriental Horses in the past 1,500 years through the lens of the Y chromosome

Since their domestication, horses have accompanied mankind, and humans have constantly shaped horses according to their needs through stallion-centered breeding. Consequently, the male-specific portion of the Y chromosome (MSY) is extremely uniform in modern horse breeds. The majority of stallions worldwide carry MSY haplotypes (HT) attributed to an only ~1,500-y-old, so-called, “Crown” haplogroup. The predominance of the Crown in modern horse breeds is thought to represent a footprint of the vast impact of stallions of “Oriental origin” in the past millennium. Here, we report the results of a fine-scaled MSY haplotyping of large datasets of patrilines comprising 1,517 males of 189 modern horse breeds, covering a broad phenotypic and geographic spectrum. We can disentangle the multilayered influence of Oriental stallions over the last few hundred years, exposing the intense linebreeding and the wide-ranging impact of Arabian, English Thoroughbred, and Coldblood sires. Iberian and New World horse breeds contain a wide range of diversified Crown lineages. Their broad HT spectrum illustrates the spread of horses of Oriental origin via the Iberian Peninsula after the Middle Ages, which is commonly referred to as the “Spanish influence.” Our survey also revealed a second major historical dissemination of horses from Western Asia, attributed to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Our analysis shows that MSY analysis can uncover the complex history of horse breeds and can be used to establish the paternal ancestry of modern horse breeds.