Did horses reach Europe via China? New fossil DNA study says yes (representative image)
A new study of fossil DNA has rewritten the evolutionary history of the horse, showing that the extinct Dalian horse from northeastern China served as a genetic bridge between North America and Eurasia.For decades, the traditional narrative held that horses were European imports to the Americas, brought by Spanish conquistadors who amazed Native Americans with a creature they had never seen before. But the latest genomic research turns this story on its head.Horses actually originated in North America millions of years ago, only arriving in Europe thanks to a surprising genetic intermediary in China.
Dalian horse
The Dalian horse, once considered a local anomaly limited to northeastern China, carried a distinct American ancestry that carried it back to ancient horse populations in Siberia, according to researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Microbiology and Ecological Changes.This gene flow meant that the bloodlines that later gave rise to modern European horses gained their American roots through this Chinese crossroads.“Dalian horses likely served as one route through which North American-related genetic lineages entered the horse populations of northeastern Eurasia,” the researchers wrote in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
A journey of 50 thousand years
Equines arose in North America during the early Eocene.
The genus Equus, which first appeared about 4 to 5 million years ago, is the only surviving subspecies, which includes all modern horses, donkeys and zebras.According to fossil records, Equus spread from North America to Eurasia via the Bering land bridge about 2.6 million years ago and then underwent extensive evolutionary diversification.A study conducted in 2025 had already proven that ancient horses migrated repeatedly between North America and Eurasia during the late Pleistocene era when sea levels dropped and a land bridge connected the two continents.The new study analyzed 20 specimens of Dalian horses from the late Pleistocene, most of which were discovered in Qinggang County in Heilongjiang Province and Harbin. The researchers recovered complete mitochondrial genomes and identified a “distinctive component” of the Eastern Beringian breed, primarily American DNA, which was absent from other Northeast Asian horses.The researchers suggested that gene flow across the Bering land bridge continued until after 50,000 years ago, although it was “intermittent and geographically limited.”First identified from excavations at Gulongshan Cave in Dalian, the Dalian horse is thought to have been confined to northeastern China during the late Pleistocene. The new study expands its scope, as two horse fossils from Yakutia in the Russian Far East fall within the range of Dalian horse mitochondrial diversity.The researchers said this indicates that the Dalian horse’s range extended “from northern China at least northwest to southern Siberia and northeast to Yakutia.”
Why did the Dalian horse disappear?
Despite its role as a genetic conduit, the Dalian Horse eventually disappeared. The researchers found that its extinction was not due to a lack of genetic diversity, but rather to its inability to adapt to a changing climate.Stable isotope analysis revealed that the Dalian horse was a specialized herder. As the environment changed about 40,000 years ago, becoming wetter, with dry grasslands replaced by peatlands and wetlands, their narrow diet made them unable to adapt.For the Dalian horse, its large body size and “limited ecological resilience” mean it cannot survive the loss of its high-quality forage.This extinction trajectory mirrors other large herbivores that disappeared in that era, such as the North American horses and the giant camel.
