Gaulish horses - coat colours?

[Imperial Dave]

Alert...rabbit hole approaching...

[Keraunos]

Given the subject, shouldn't that be a mole hill, or is that ruled out for being out of period?

[Imperial Dave]

 

[Erpingham]

But we are left in suspense.  Is Alfred Duggan the source and it is a modern myth, or did he base his fiction on anything? 

I've really struggled to find much pre-20th century evidence for this.  An online post suggests Marbot in his memoirs refers to an example, but refering to artillery fire i.e. at much longer ranges where the visibility difference might be more prominent.  A 1912 British army remount directive puts grey horses as a special purposes requirement and generally requires dark coloured horses but gives no reason. The American army directive for the invasion of Mexico instructed light coloured horses be left behind.  The French army in WWI painted grey horses brown and there is at least one example of a British cavalry regiment painting musicians white horses brown.*  British forces in Africa in WWI painted grey horses and mules with zebra stripes (this sounds like a myth but there are several photos).  So, by WWI and the time of long-range weapons, the conspicuousness of pale horses was acknowledged as a problem.

This doesn't go anywhere near answering the question, except to suggest that the idea isn't a commonplace.  Really it needs more of a classically literate person to consider possible sources (poetic, perhaps) for the belief.

* referring to an earlier topic about the prominence of the visual over smell in unsettling horses, I've noted both a US and British example of camouflaged horses being attacked by their fellows, even though the grey horse was well-known.

[Swampster]

I thought that the absence of spotting genes meant no markings, but on some further googling apparently only some white markings are caused by spotting genes. So the study is probably silent on the presence of other white markings.

(Hey, it wouldn't be genetics if it wasn't horribly complicated!)

Rabbit holes indeed...
This https://horsereality.wiki/en/colour-genetics/white-markings seems to be some kind of game based on horse genetics(!)
They reckon the genetics of white markings is so far not understood and may be polygenetic. The ancient horse DNA therefore can't be said one way or the other to show whether there were any markings. Some alleles such as W20 seem to amplify whatever causes the markings.

If I'd done this sort of thing when I had a genetics module at college, I may have paid attention. Not that it had got much further then Mendel's peas at that time.


Came across this https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/britannia/article/abs/armies-and-enemies-of-imperial-rome-by-philip-barker-sussex-1972-pp-90-2-126-line-illustrations-price-175/E10B1850070F13329DA659A9C59F3D05 while looking for older editions of AEIR online. Lack of footnotes was noted in 1973   (though in fairness to all the WRG books, he does say that footnotes would be out of place in this kind of book).