 This would prove the last wild-caught horse, and with the presumed extinction of wild population, last sighted in Mongolia in the late 1960s, the captive population became the sole representatives of Przewalski's horse.By 1979, when a concerted program of population management to maximize genetic diversity was begun, there were almost four hundred horses in sixteen facilities, a number that had grown by the early 1990s to over 1,500.Several populations have now been released into the wild.