Posted on 11/29/2005 8:24:25 PM PST by SunkenCiv
...As I mentioned before, many Native Americans believe that horse was in America many centuries before Columbus. Pony Boy gives one of such traditional narratives in his book, although, it needs to be noted, he generally tends to support the mainstream academic view of horse history in America.
Here's a picture of a very unusual "Przewalski horse".
This wild horse is still found in Mongolia. It is so different, it has 66 chromosomes as compared to the 64 that we find in all other horses. This is a very primitive kind of horse, the one probably quite similar to what the ancient peoples first domesticated. (Nevertheless, some researchers believe that it represents a whole different species as compared to our domesticated horses.)
(Excerpt) Read more at trends.ca ...
Dunno. I think I just read that Przewalski was Russian.
Never mind that question, I guess it was not Poland that was attempting to restore the breed. That link was very helpful.
The breed name stuck in my mind. I had read about it many (more than I want to admit to) years ago. I don't know why I thought it was Poland that was attempting to restore the breed.
And the number one answer...
No one has even bothered to look, because, after all, everyone knows that a few horses lost by Coronado's expedition produced all the horses used by all the tribes which used horses.
Not entirely true. Before the Spanish reintroduction of horses to the Americas, there is no evidence of domesticated horses in the archaeological record. After the reintroduction, evidence of domestic horses among the native plains populations rapidly became endemic. Why the sudden change? The possibility that a hypothetical native population of horses could go from invisible obscurity to universality in the archaeological record so quickly and coincidentally to the reintroduction of horses by the Spanish stretches the limits of credibility.
The incredible usefulness of the domestic horse makes it inconceivable that native Americans would not have exploited such an resource, had they been available. Before the arrival of the Spanish and their horses, the people of the great plains managed to scrape a subsistence by chasing buffalo over cliffs. After the reintroduction of horses, the intelligent and resourceful people of the plains rapidly capitalized on the potential of this new resource. Instead of waiting and hoping for a buffalo herd to wander close enough to a usable "buffalo jump", the horse allowed the plains people to run down the buffalo at will. Almost overnight we see in the archaeological record a shift in native plains cultures and economies around the horse.
The Book of Mormon references horses existing in pre-columbus days.
Of course, most scientist have debuked this.
The mustang skull itself will need to be carbon dated before it's purported age can be considered legitimate. Until then, it must be considered of dubious merit.
That being said, when it finally is carbon dated, if it does turn out to be legitimately pre-columbian, then it is probably one of the most significant finds in archeology.
The possibility that they might have introduced a stable population of horses that survived them is a lot more dubious. The environment and climate of northeast America at the time was either frozen tundra or heavily forested, neither of which are environs suitable for exploting horses. This is especially true at the beginning of the second millenium when the northern hemisphere was entering a miniature ice age (which was what eventually wiped out the Norse population in Greenland).
Norse horses would have been of little use to the native Dorsett and Eskimo populations except as a short lived bonus source of meat. The chance that a small abandoned population could have survived the predations of both humans and animals to travel throught the forests to the inland plains where their natural gifts could be best exploited by the plains natives is infinitesimally small. Moreover, the amazing potential of the horse, upon arrival in the plains, means it would have been rapidly adopted and utilized by the population there as soon as it arrived. Which they did when the horse arrived from Spain, many centuries after the Norse left.
I think that's well established. I've dug for fossils of an extinct miniature horse, Plesippus shoshonensis gidley, in the Hagerman Fossil Beds in southwest Idaho. The Hagerman Horse has the distinction of being the earliest record of Equus, the genus that includes all modern horses, donkeys, and zebras.
It's odd to find this thread right now. I'm re-reading DeVoto's edition of Lewis & Clark's journals and got to wondering how the Nez Perce became master horse-breeders so quickly after the horse's reintroduction to America. The Appaloosa breed (aka Palouse War Horse) was legendary in Idaho where I grew up.
It was interesting to read Lewis & Clark's praise about them. I agree there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence as yet that any such horses preceded Columbus. But I think there's some logic to the argument they came from an area where pre-Columbian contacts with Asia, if any, were likely to have occurred. But one has to ask: why the Nez Perce, a mountain tribe, and not aboriginals closer to the Pacific coast?
The best estimate is that the horse was reintroduced to North America by Coronado's expeditions in the middle of the 1500's. The Lewis And Clark expedition was made in 1804. That's about 250 years for the Nez Perce to acquire the horse and become master horse breeders. Moreover, the introduction of the horse to the Nez Perce was at least as great a technological advancement as the introduction of the automobile in the last century. Do you also wonder how modern North Americans became master car builders so quickly after the automobile's introduction to America?
For a resource as revolutionary useful as the horse, two and a half centuries is more than enough time for a people to learn how to fully exploit it and then forget there was ever a time when they didn't have it. Especially when you consider that they preserved their history primarily orally, and the Spaniard's other gift to North America, smallpox, was incredibly effective at wiping out the older generations and their memories just as they were coming into contact with the horse for the first time.
Or, put another way, given the choice between spending my time hoping a buffalo herd wanders close enough to a cliff for me to stampede enough over it to make enough pemmican to survive the coming winter or just using a horse to follow the herds and run down individual buffalo as needed, I'd sure be spending my time learning how to ride and breed horses.
On the other hand, every tribe on the great plains at that time, I think, had recent memories of acquiring horses and moving onto the plains.
If it's so easy why have they forgotten how to do it so quickly, lol? I guess the "American" automobile is in process of going extinct and is being re-introduced from Asia and Europe, just like the horse was. And the horses didn't even have unions!
With a timeline of 250 years the scenario you discuss is certainly possible and probably likely. I wasn't even doubting it. I was 'wondering,' a pastime I think that is still allowed.
I was wondering how a rather minor tribe located about as far north from Spanish influence as possible within the current outline of the U.S., came into possession of such fine equine bloodlines. (Yes, I know about Indian skill at horse-stealing and that such a 'technological advancement' would be highly prized and rapidly disseminated).
I wonder why a tribe that didn't hunt buffalo regularly, being located in a non-buffalo region and being very fearful of the ferocious Blackfoot who dominated buffalo habitat on the western Great Plains, would be so focused on horse-breeding. I wonder how the concept of selective breeding came to them -- it certainly wasn't a common Indian practice to my knowledge.
Trade to pacify hostile neighbors might account for the focus on breeding. If you can't defeat your enemy in war it's a good idea to be the only source of a commodity he values. And of course selective breeding is simply a matter of careful observation and time. But we have no real idea of when the Nez Perce actually came into possession of their breeding stock or how long it took them to develop a breeding program.
I certainly don't underrate the Nez Perce. Later, with the Palouse War Horse as a resource, Chief Joseph ran humiliating circles around the U.S. Cavalry and almost escaped with his tribe's women and children to Canada. His defeat was one of the great unnecessary tragedies of Manifest Destiny and a lasting testament to his and his people's resourcefulness. But sometimes I still wonder and consider alternate possibilities ...
I've often wondered about the birth rate of cattle and horses deemed responsible for the launch of the Longhorns in Texas and wild horses all over the West.
I thought the birthrate would be about 1 per year. How much brood stock would it take to form huge herds of thousands of animals? Anyone with a math flair could figure out the geometric progression.
I've got some research that puts the first settlers in the Rio Grande valley in the early 1700s with 'thousands of cattle and horses) but where did they come from? Hard to believe the Spanish were bringing boatloads of animals over from 1512 onward.
The Icelandic's have a small sturdy horse similar to the Mongolian horse. http://www.imh.org/imh/bw/iceland.html Don't know how many chromasomes it has.
I guess you've read the whole topic then/
I'm not cherry picking the report, you are. As the anecdotal evidence points to an entirely different mound for the later introduction, there's no chance for the anecdote to have any bearing on it. No one in the report is accepting anything "based on faith", but the attitude that the horse was extinct in the Americas until the Coronado expedition reintroduced it -- an event for which there is testimony in firsthand accounts of the expedition, I'm sure -- is nothing but faith. Whether the horse was reintroduced is the question.
You're about 6-10 thousand years short. Even be bactrian camel has been domesticated for 8-10 thousand years, as the llama for at least 7500.
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