Home » News » Animals: How donkeys changed the course of human history

Animals: How donkeys changed the course of human history

  • Author, Dhananjay Khadilkar
  • Role, BBC Future
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Archaeologists have made a discovery that is helping to rewrite much of what we know about donkeys.

They are best known for being beasts of burden. In some parts of the world they have been associated, perhaps unfairly, with terms of insult or derision.

But in a French village 280 km east of Paris, archaeologists have made a discovery that is helping to rewrite much of what we know about them, donkeys.

At the site of an ancient Roman villa in the village of Boinville-en-Woëvre, a team unearthed the remains of several donkeys that would have dwarfed most species we know of today.

“They were giant donkeys,” says Ludovic Orlando, director of the Toulouse Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics, at Purpan Medical School, Toulouse, France.

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