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This week let's learn about a mystery that was solved by science!\n\nHappy birthday to Zoe!\n\nFurther reading:\n\nLet's all do the kunga!\n\nThe kunga, as depicted in a 4500-year-old mosaic:\n\n\n\nThe Syrian wild ass as depicted in a 1915 photograph (note the size of the animal compared to the man standing behind it):\n\n\n\nDomestic donkeys:\n\n\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nAs this episode goes live, I should be on my way home from Dragon Con, ready to finish moving into my new apartment! It\u2019s been an extremely busy week, so we\u2019re just going to have a short episode about a historical mystery that was recently solved by science.\n\nBut first, we have another birthday shout-out! Happy birthday to Zoe, and I hope you have the most sparkly and exciting birthday ever, unless you\u2019d rather have a chill and low-key birthday, which is just as good depending on your mood.\n\nThis week we\u2019re going to learn about an animal called the kunga, which I learned about on Dr. Karl Shuker\u2019s blog. There\u2019s a link in the show notes if you\u2019d like to read his original post.\n\nThe mystery of the kunga goes back thousands of years, to the fertile crescent in the Middle East. We\u2019ve talked about this area before in episode 177, about the sirrush, specifically Mesopotamia. I\u2019ll quote from that episode to give you some background:\n\n"These days the countries of Iraq and Kuwait, parts of Turkey and Syria, and a little sliver of Iran are all within what was once called Mesopotamia. It\u2019s part of what\u2019s sometimes referred to as the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. The known history of this region goes back five thousand years in written history, but people have lived there much, much longer. Some 50,000 years ago humans migrated from Africa into the area, found it a really nice place to live, and settled there.\n\n"Parts of it are marshy but it\u2019s overall a semi-arid climate, with desert to the north. People developed agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, including irrigation, but many cultures specialized in fishing or nomadic grazing of animals they domesticated, including sheep, goats, and camels. As the centuries passed, the cultures of the area became more and more sophisticated, with big cities, elaborate trade routes, and stupendous artwork."\n\nThe domestic horse wasn\u2019t introduced to this area until about 4,000 years ago, although donkeys were common. The domestic donkey is still around today, of course, and is descended from the African wild ass. Researchers estimate it was domesticated 5- or 6,000 years ago by the ancient nomadic peoples of Nubia, and quickly spread throughout the Middle East and into southern Asia and Europe.\n\nBut although horses weren\u2019t known in the Middle East 4,500 years ago, we have artwork that shows an animal that looks like a really big donkey, much larger than the donkeys known at the time. It was called the kunga and was highly prized as a beast of burden since it was larger and stronger than an ordinary donkey. It was also rare, bred only in Syria and exported at high prices. No one outside of Syria knew what kind of animal the kunga really was, but we have writings that suggest it was a hybrid animal of some kind. This explains why its breeding was such a secret and why it couldn\u2019t be bred elsewhere. Many hybrid animals are infertile and can\u2019t have babies.\n\nIf the artwork was from later times, we could assume it showed mules, the offspring of a horse and a donkey. But horses definitely weren\u2019t known in the Middle East or nearby areas at this time, so it can\u2019t have been a mule.\n\nThe kunga was used as a beast of burden to pull plows and wagons, but the largest individuals were used to pull the chariots of kings. Fortunately, the kunga was so highly prized that it was sometimes sacrificed and buried with important people as part of their grave goods. Archaeologists have found a number of kunga skeletons, together with ceremonial harnesses.