Wild ass tamed, buried with Egyptian king

Some context
In the new study, whole skeletons allowed researchers to look at the bones in context to paint a picture of what the animals were up to so long ago.

Marshall and her colleagues compared the bones of the Abydos skeletons with 53 modern donkey and African wild ass skeletons. The results suggested the Abydos donkeys would have looked similar to the Somali wild ass, a subspecies of African wild ass that are still alive today. That would mean the Abydos donkey would have stood at four feet at the shoulder, weighing about 600 pounds. For comparison, a zebra is about the same shoulder height and can weigh up to about 900 pounds.

However, the wear and tear of joints and other boney characteristics indicated the animals carried heavy loads like modern-day donkeys. Every load-bearing joint of the donkeys showed signs of abrasion, suggesting so much wear and tear that the joints' protective tissue — the cartilage — had worn away. The researchers noted arthritis of the vertebra bones just behind the shoulders, where loads are typically placed.

While they weren’t young’uns, the donkeys were not old enough to justify the bone damage, with the donkeys’ estimated ages somewhere between 8 and 13 years when they perished.

Noble ass
The donkeys as beasts of burden would have represented the earliest use of animals (other than humans) to carry humans and their goods.

“This is the first evidence for donkeys carrying loads, which is important because they were the first transport animal,” Marshall told LiveScience, “absolutely the first loads off humans' backs to create land transport routes, the earliest trade routes between Egyptians and Sumerians and so on.”

The importance of the donkey haulers is supported by the skeletons’ burial location. The researchers speculate the donkeys were associated with the tomb of either King Narmer or King Aha. King Narmer is known for unifying Upper and Lower Egypt and creating the world’s first nation-state.

“It certainly suggests they were of very great importance to the pharaoh and the early Egyptian state,” Marshall said. “It's very likely that having land-based transport of this kind actually helped to integrate the state, which was the world's first and earliest nation-state.”

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