“…The 15 autosomal microsatellite markers we applied have been in widespread use since they were recommended for diversity studies by ISAG‐FAO and the International Society for Animal Genetics (Cothran & Luís, 2005; FAO, 2011). Despite the advance of SNP genotyping, very few studies of horses have used SNPs to date for phylogenetic questions (Petersen et al, 2013) and the use of use of 12 to 17 microsatellites for breed analysis remains popular (e.g., Cosenza, La Rosa, Rosati, & Chiofalo, 2019; Isakova et al, 2019; Khanshour, Hempsey, Juras, & Cothran, 2019; Khaudov et al, 2019; Ustyantseva, Khrabrova, Abramova, & Ryabova, 2019; Zeng et al, 2019). The dendrogram of breed relationships analyzed by SNP typing of 36 breeds (Petersen et al, 2013) is almost an exact match of the results from the 15 microsatellite loci, thus suggesting that the results from our 15 microsatellites are robust.…”