On the origins of the Exmoor pony: did the wild
horse survive in Britain?
Hans (J.P.M.) Hovens & Toon (A.J.M.) Rijkers.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Speed (1951a,
1951b, 1956), Speed and Etherington (1952a,
1952b) and Ebhardt (1962) compared the bones
and teeth of Pleistocene pony fossils with those
of modern horse breeds and Exmoor ponies.
They concluded that the modern Exmoor pony
directly descends from the smaller Northern
horse that lived in France and Britain during the Late Pleistocene. Unfortunately, these
findings went relatively unnoticed by zoologists at the time. According to Groves (1986)
British wild horses became extinct after the
Pleistocene and Exmoor ponies descend from
escaped domestic horses. Mohr (1971), on the
other hand, argues that Exmoor ponies are
partly descended from wild ponies that lived in
Britain during the Late Pleistocene and partly
from later imported breeds. The earliest discovered definitively British wild horse remains
are estimated to date back to 8411 BC (Sommer
et al. 2011).
In recent years the Exmoor pony has generally been described as the most primitive man
made horse breed found in Britain (e.g. Aberle
& Distl 2004, Cieslak et al. 2010) and the wild
ancestors of domestic horses are regarded as
being extinct (Warmuth et al. 2011). However,
recent mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) studies on the origin of horses have revealed new
insights, particularly on the geographical distribution of different wild horse populations
(Jansen et al. 2002, Cieslak et al. 2010). We
argue in this paper that the Exmoor pony may
directly descend from a wild type of pony population that lived in north-west Europe during
the Late Pleistocene. The aim of this paper is to
reconsider the true origin of the Exmoor pony,
by focussing on specific anatomical, morphological and genetic characteristics, such as the
jaws and teeth, coat colour, manes and mtDNA
of Exmoor ponies and other horse types.