Donkeys were domesticated in Africa five to seven thousand years ago
The donkey descends from the African wild ass and has hauled loads for millennia. More than forty million live mostly in poorer countries as pack and draught animals. Males are jacks, females jennies; crossed with horses they yield mules or the rarer hinny.
Taxonomy wavers between Equus asinus and a subspecies of E. africanus; a 2003 ICZN ruling guides naming when wild and domestic forms are split or lumped. Ass was once the common English word; donkey appears only in 1784 or 1785 with obscure etymology—guesses include Spanish don gravity or diminutive dun for the coat color.
By the late eighteenth century donkey and jenny displaced ass and she-ass, likely to dodge pejorative slang, akin to rooster replacing cock in North America. Small numbers now serve as pets or breeding stock in wealthy regions, but the global majority still work near subsistence. By the late 1600s shifting pronunciation had made ass and arse sound alike in some English dialects. Regional names multiplied: cuddy in Scotland, neddy in the south-west of England, dicky in the south-east, and moke, recorded in the nineteenth century and possibly Welsh or Romani. In the western United States, burro usually means the feral donkeys living beyond the Rockies. Wealthier countries keep a few for breeding, as pets or to guard livestock.
The donkey's direct forebears are the Nubian and Somali subspecies of the African wild ass, and domestic remains from the fourth millennium BC have turned up at Ma'adi in Lower Egypt. The wider horse genus probably arose from Dinohippus by way of Plesippus; an early member, Equus simplicidens, looked like a zebra with a donkey's head, and the oldest fossil, from Idaho, is about 3.5 million years old. Genetic studies place the last common ancestor of modern equids around four to five and a half million years ago, with Asian wild asses such as the kulan and onager branching off first, then zebras.
Source: Donkey
