A new find of an equid metatarsal bone from tell mureibet in syria and its relevance to the identification of equids from the early holocene of the levant

Abstract

A comparative study of the equid bones and teeth from Dr Van Loon’s excavations at Tell Mureibet (1968) was carried out in 1970. It was concluded that the fragments of bones and teeth, which can be dated to the eighth or seventh millennium BC, belonged to the asinus group of equids rather than to the hemionus group (Ducos, 1970). Features that appeared to be more like asinus in the Tell Mureibet upper teeth are the flatness or convexity of the external walls (interstylid faces) and in the lower teeth the shape of the lingual sinus (dividing the double curl of the metastylid and metaconid) which is usually a narrow V-shape with a more or less sharp angle in E. asinus. The upper teeth of E. hemionus have concave external walls and the lingual sinus of the lower teeth has a slightly curved, wide V-shape. An examination of skulls of Equus hemionus onuger and Equus asinus africanus from Museums in Vienna, Munich and London showed that these characters are only true in general. In each group, examples where the characters are developed atypically can be found. So, an attribution to Equus hemionus hemippus I. Geoffroy, 1855 being eliminated because this animal was too small, the attribution to E. asinus, rather than to E. hemionus onager Boddaert, 1785, remained uncertain. This is the reason why the find of a complete equid metatarsal bone from Dr Cauvin’s new excavation at Tell Mureibet was most exciting, for a certain identification of the species could be made from this bone. It was found in a level contemporary with the 1st to VIIIth strata of Van Loon’s stratigraphy (square Q34. Locus Z 1, depth 10.50 m, level C lb; on the clay soil of a round house; structure L IV ter). The length of the bone is 239.2 mm; this is much above the length for E. hemionus hemippus (225.2 mm maximum on a specimen in the Vienna Museum) but it is very close to the length of the metatarsal bones of Kiang and Khur hemiones and also to the length of E. asinus africanus. The most distinctive character of the bone is the value of the “slenderness” index, that is the ratio of the minimum medio-lateral width to the total length. The value of this index for the Tell Mureibet metatarsal is 11.2 which is typical of the asinus group, and in consequence the bone has been ascribed to an ass rather than to a hemione. The Asiatic hemiones never reach an index of this height, and, although there is a metatarsal belonging to E. hemionus khur Lesson, 1907 in the British Museum (Natural History) with an index of 10.6, the values given by Gromova (1959) are all below 10.5. The existence of a wild ass of the asinus group in the Levant during the early Holocene now seems indisputable. The remains of this ass have been found most often in prehistoric sites on the plains of northern and eastern Syria, at Tell Mureibet and El Kown for example. In the settlement sites of southwestern Syria and Israel it is found occasionally