Kunga

The kunga was a hybrid equid bred in ancient Syria and Mesopotamia from a female domesticated donkey and a wild male Syrian wild ass, used from around the mid-third millennium BCE as a draft animal for plows and war wagons and prized as an economic and political status symbol. A 2022 paleogenomics study confirmed kungas were first-generation hybrids of captured wild-ass males and domestic donkey females, making them the earliest known human-engineered hybrid animal, predating the earliest mule by about 1,500 years. Kungas disappeared from the historical record after domesticated horses and mules reached the region near the end of the third millennium BCE and displaced them. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/