Y-DNA progress and promise
These two figures from the seminal paper Remer et al, 2022 on Y-DNA in Arabian horses will become the subject of much attention in the coming years.
A blog on desert arabian horses, past, present and future
A blog on desert arabian horses, past, present and future
These two figures from the seminal paper Remer et al, 2022 on Y-DNA in Arabian horses will become the subject of much attention in the coming years.
I’m not clear about what the wheel charts are indicating.. Does it mean that the Kuhaylan Afas line is clustered over with the and is therefor part of the Turkoman line.. Also if i read it correctly the study authors excluded 7 dna samples from racing arabians because they were the ones that showed evidence of the recent cross of Thoroughbreds. Does that mean that they were the ones that Edouard, you found out about which showed modern breeders snuck Thoroughbreds in while doing the midnight breedings..
Best
Bruce Peek
It means one of the sire lines listed as going back to Kuhailan Afas is not really to him, but an English TB. I missed the place where the authors make that second point of yours, but I will re-read the paper and get back to you on that.
I have two hypotheses re the Kuhailan Afas line being Tb-oB1*.
The first is that there were historically more sire lines in Bahrain than now exist; I don’t have access to the Bahraini stud book, but to the best of my knowledge, the only sire line documented is Dhahmaan Aloud, which has tested Ao-aA1a*. I have seen a translated copy of Kuhailan Afas’ hujjah and pedigree, drawn up by the secretary of Sheikh Hamed ibn Isa al-Khalifah, where the male line is Kuhailan Abu ‘Arqub > Kuhailan Shawaf > Kuhailan Wadnan > Kuhailan Afas; it is extended no further.
The second hypothesis is that there is an error in the pedigrees of the K. Afas tail male horses tested, who all happen to trace to Probat. Kuhailan Afas’ son Bad Afas was bred at Zabawa, which happened to be using a Denouste son Caid the year Bad Afas was conceived. Denouste’s tail male descendants through Kann and through St Laurent have tested Tb-oB1*, the same as the Kuhailan Afas descendants through Probat.
There are no other sons of Kuhailan Afas whose sire lines we can test, but we have a short window of time left in which to test Bad Afas’ sire line via his son Arcus, who has tail male descendants through Dunajec in the U.S.. It would also be worth testing tail male descent from Pohaniec sons other than Probat, and from Comet sons other than Pohaniec, to see if the Tb-oB1* Y-chromosome is consistent throughout the Kuhailan Afas line.
Its in the 2nd paragraph of the globally active arab sire lines. They say 7 arabs and 4 akhal Tekes showed up with one of the Tb sire lines so they were excluded since the study was about arabian sire lines.
Best
“We need to state here that seven Arabian horses and four Akhal Teke were observed to carry the Tb-dW1 haplotype. This HT was previously attributed to a recent admixture with Thoroughbreds [20,22,27]. These horses were omitted from further analysis as the goal of this work was to focus solely on the Arabian Y-chromosomal lineages.”
What is the difference between Tb-dW1 and Tb-oB1*?
Also, a question to Kate: are the Godolphin B, the Darley A and the Byerley T the only sire lines in the English TB? or are they just the main sirelines, and there are other, minor sirelines?
The short answer is that the three surviving sirelines in the Thoroughbred are the Byerley Turk (the oldest), the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian (the youngest). The Godolphin Barb is a different kettle of fish; there were two of them, a grey and a brown Barb, about twenty years younger than the Arabian, which is another reason why it puts my teeth on edge when people call the Godolphin Arabian the Godolphin Barb.
The slightly longer answer is that there were other sirelines in the Thoroughbred, e.g. the Acaster Turk, the Alcock Arabian, the Belgrade Turk, the Bloody-Shouldered Arabian, Curwen’s Bay Barb, Darcy’s two Turks (the White and the Yellow), the Fairfax Morocco Barb, the Leedes Arabian, the St. Victor Barb, etc. To the best of my knowledge, pretty much all of these other sirelines petered out in the Thoroughbred before the nineteenth century; I think Hautboy’s line may have made it to the early 1800s, before it too gave way to the three juggernauts.
Re Tb-dW1, that is the Y-chromosome haplotype for all direct male descendants of Whalebone, the chief branch of the Darley Arabian sireline. If a horse tests Tb-dW1, it has to descend from Whalebone, because the mutation is found only in his line, and not in the other Darley Arabian tail male descendants, who are Tb-d. Tb-oB1 is the Y-chromosome haplotype for the tail male descendants of the Byerley Turk.
The Godolphin Arabian sireline also belongs to the Tb haplogroup, and Felkel et al. 2019 note that its name has been changed from Tb-g to Tb-oB3b; it is also being squeezed out and will soon be lost to the Thoroughbred.