DONKEY- HISTORY OF DONKEY
today I’d like to talk about where our modern-day donkey came from and I’m going to go through around fifty million years in around five minutes. The ancestor of the modern donkey and horse was called high RAC aetherium or dawn horse lived around 50 million years ago and was a dog sized animal with four tiny hooves on each front leg and three on the back you can see bones of front lower limb on the right of your screen according to the theory of evolution all vertebrates those animals with a backbone are built to common basic blueprint from bats to whales cats to humans over the millenia.
This is a very slow process adaptations occur to make a species better able to survive in the environment in which it lives all the bones in cream this diagram are a variation on the theme of a five-digit appendage so the whale developed a very efficient flipper perfectly designed to power him through the water and man developed a highly dexterous hand allowing for complex tasks such as writing but what of the donkey well in order to run faster and live more successfully in the areas of desert lands of its native North Africa. it gradually reduced the number of functional digits and ended up walking on the very tip of its middle digit which became both longer and stronger today’s donkey still has the remnants of its second and fourth digits the very slender and now functionalist split bones lying on the back surface of cannon bone that’s the long between what we call the knee and fetlock the knee is actually the equivalent of our wrist and the fetlock is equivalent of our knuckle who knows in
million years or so those useless splint burns may have disappeared the thing about evolution is it never stops if that all seemed a bit complicated maybe this diagram will help note the identical bones in the donkeys lower limb and the human middle finger can you see that the donkey is walking on his middle finger and of course the same applies to the horse now let’s fast forward to around five thousand years ago where there is evidence that donkeys were domesticated and used as beasts of burden and as a source of meat in Egypt.
this Egyptian stone carving on the Left dates back some 5000 years and clearly shows donkeys looking much like the donkeys of today donkeys skeletons have been found with damaged back bones indicating that they were carrying heavy loads indeed.
donkeys were written long before horses as the Romans started to take over the world they took donkeys with them as beasts of burden and we have the Romans to thank for donkeys living throughout Europe and the UK today donkeys are found all over the world and there are species of major economic importance in developing countries they are the white van JCB the tractor for people who cannot afford heavy machinery anyone who has kept a donkey will know that they are truly wonderful and seem to develop a really special affinity with people who have mental and physical challenges and they are increasingly used to bring joy and peace a variety of such people from children to War veterans and if you’re wondering about the donkey on the bottom left well this is a be farmers donkey in his full working gear scientists believe that
altered donkeys are descended from two types the Somali donkey is still wild but the Nubian is believed to be extinct in the wild although of course you will recognize it as a thoroughly modern donkey interestingly the stripey legs seen on the Somali donkey are often present on today’s domesticated donkeys indicating crossbreeding way back in time today we see a huge variety of donkeys both in terms of size and color if you’re a donkey owner in the Middle East or the desert areas of US your donkeys should feel right at home
we have seen that they are descendants of donkeys from hot and arid areas of the world and we know that they thrive in warm dry weather if however you keep a donkey in the UK where there is an abundance of grass and rain well the donkey is truly out of its environmental comfort zone and that makes management quite a challenge just remember evolutionary change is a very slow process donkeys having only been in northern Europe for around 2,000 years our relative newcomers and have not had time to adapt to suit the cooler wetter climate do have a look at my presentation entitled donkeys not just a small horse.