Horses Arabian

Are there any Arabian horses left in the wild desert of the Middle East?

Are there any still in the wild? If so, what do they eat? And if not, what did the wild Arabian horses eat 4000 years ago? Someone may find this a silly question, but recently while i was flying over The Arabian countries and could see nothing but desert this question came into my mind. Thanks! Any extra info will be muchly appreciated!! xx

Public Comments

1. Arabian horses are derived from other domestic horses, not from a wild stock. The only wild ones would be feral. That means ones which have, sensibly enough, decided to run off and do their own thing. <<... what did the wild Arabian horses eat 4000 years ago?>> Nothing, as there weren't any. Horse domestication probably took place in the Caucasus area of eastern Europe. In any event, Ancient Indo-European people are to blame. All modern domestic horses are descendants of their horses.
2. not as much as it was 500 years ago
3. Horses and camels originated in North America and crossed the Bering Strait to Asia. About 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the horse and other large mammals such as mammoths became extinct in North America. The llama is a close relative of the camel that migrated to South America but also became extinct in North America. Archaeological evidence suggests there were horses in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon). Horses were rare in the Arabian Peninsula, because they were not adapted to the extreme desert conditions. There is no consensus on the origin of the Arabian horse but it was probably domesticated from horses found natively in the Fertile Cresecent about 6,000 years ago. The Arabian horse does show some desert adaptations, such as a larger nasal cavity. This is because the respiratory turbinates found in the nasal cavity capture the water from the exhaled, moist hair from the lung and return it to the lung when the horse inhales. All mammals and birds have respiratory turbinates to conserve water, since mammals and birds breathe in 20 times as much air as reptiles in order to generate body heat internally. Without the turbinates, it is estimated that we lose 75% of our daily water intake. Even with the enlarged nasal cavity, Arabian horses are not as well adapted to the desert as camels. They would probably be unable to survive in the Arabian desert if they were let go there. The only wild horses left in the world is the endangered Przewalski's horse, which has apparently been the only horse that has not been domesticated. The other type of wild horse, which is the close relative of the Przewalski and also the ancestor of the domestic horses, is now extinct in the wild. All other "wild" horses found around the world (e.g. USA and Australia) today are feral domestic horses. Genetic studies show that the domestic horses have a high degree of mtDNA diversity, which means that the horse was probably domesticated many different times throughout history from different areas around the world. Quite likely, the horse was domesticated by native peoples around the world wherever they were found, leading to the extinction of the wild ancestor of the domestic horse, and leaving the Przewalski's horse of Central Asia and China as the only true wild horse left in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski%27s_Horse