Thoroughbred Origins Revealed

A team of scientists at the University of Cambridge have completed a study which shows that racehorses may not have as strong Arab origins as was previously thought.

The English Thoroughbred is one of the best-known horse breeds in the western hemisphere. They appeared in the seventeenth century in Britain, thanks to the popularity of horse-racing, and associated gambling, among the English gentry.

The lineage of the breed is recorded in the General Stud Book, which was first published in 1793 and collects the pedigrees of the horses used in racing at the time and who'd raced in the past. It documents the paternal origins of the breed very well, which came from a handful of Arabian stallions imported into the country, but the maternal origins were very poorly recorded, as it was assumed at the time that they were less important.

However, it's since been discovered that the maternal lineage of racehorses is important to race performance, so researchers have been trying to get to the bottom of exactly which mares were involved in the early days of the breed -- a subject which the researchers' paper, published in Biology Letters, describes as having "a history of intense speculation".