Sex in the city: Uncovering sex-specific management of equine resources from prehistoric times to the Modern Period in France

Sex identification from fragmentary archeozoological assemblages is particularly challenging in the Equid family, including for horses, donkeys and their hybrids. This limitation has precluded in-depth investigations of sex-ratio variation in various temporal, geographic and social contexts. Recently, shallow DNA sequencing has offered an economical solution to equine sex determination, even in environments where DNA preservation conditions is not optimal. In this study, we applied state-of-the-art methods in ancient DNA-based equine sex determination to 897 osseous remains in order to assess whether equal proportions of males and females could be found in a range of archeological contexts in France. We found Magdalenian horse hunt not focused on isolated bachelors, and Upper Paleolithic habitats and natural traps equally balancing sex ratios. In contrast, Iron Age sacrificial rituals appeared to have been preferentially oriented to male horses and this practice extended into the Roman Period. During Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Period, cities emerged as environments largely dominated by horse males. This strong sex-bias was considerably reduced, and sometimes even absent, in various rural contexts. Combined with previous archaeozoological work and textual evidence, our results portray an urban economy fueled by adult, often old, males, and rural environments where females and subadults of both sexes were maintained to sustain production demands.
We thank Agnès Orsoni, Michela Leonardi, and Stefanie Wagner for lab assistance and all members of the AGES research team at CAGT for fruitful discussions. We also thank all archaeologists, curators and staff in charge of archaeological warehouses, who have facilitated access to the material analyzed in this study. Pierre Clavel’s PhD position is funded by the CNRS MITI interdisciplinary programme (‘Mission pour les Initiatives Transverses et Interdisciplinaires’). Xuexue Liu was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation pro- gramme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement 101027750. This work was supported by the France G ́enomique Appel `a Grand Projet (ANR-10-INBS-09-08, BUCEPHALE project); the Initiative d’Excellence Chaires d’attractivit ́e, Universit ́e de Toulouse (OURASI) and the Villum Fonden miGENEPI research project. Andaine Seguin- Orlando acknowledges IAST for funding from ANR (France) under grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (‘Investissements d’Avenir’ programme). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 681605).