Posted on 08/01/2022 12:20:19 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Species of the horse genus Equus first appeared on the North American continent during the Pliocene era and spread to and across Eurasia beginning around 2.5 million years ago. They disappeared from the Western Hemisphere during the megafauna extinction event at the end of the Pleistocene and the last glacial period. The return of equids to the Americas through the introduction of the domestic horse (Equus caballus) is documented in the historical literature but is not explored fully either archaeologically or genetically. Historical documents suggest that the first domestic horses were brought from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caribbean in the late 15th century CE, but archaeological remains of these early introductions are rare. In new research, scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Georgia Museum of Natural History sequenced the mitochondrial genome of a 16th century horse from the Spanish colonial site of Puerto Real, northern Haiti...
In a new study, Dr. Delsol and his colleagues examined a tooth fragment, originally misidentified as cow, found at Puerto Real.
They sequenced the mitochondrial genome, not only allowing for a correct identification, but also making this the earliest known complete mitogenome of a post-Columbian domestic horse in the Americas.
According to the team, this horse belongs to a genetic lineage called equine haplogroup A, whose members are well known from Southern Europe, supporting the hypothesis that they originated on the Iberian Peninsula.
Furthermore, this horse’s closest living relatives are the feral ponies of Chincoteague Island, Virginia, said by local folk stories to have become stranded after a Spanish shipwreck.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci.news ...
The discovery of a fossil horse tooth in Haiti has given surprising credence to the idea the horses escaped from a Spanish shipwreck off Virginia around 1750. [Young Chincoteague ponies wrestle on Chincoteague Island, part of Virginia's Eastern Shore, in the 1970s.]Photograph By James L. Stanfield, Nat Geo Image Collection
The tooth was found on a corral reef. /rimshot
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
Everyone was overjoyed whinny succeeded.
They all looked like Twilight Sparkle too.
Chincoteague Island Ponies
Good place for a gallop pole.
See those Egrets (cowbirds) in that picture? On occasion, I can have a hundred of those in my yard. Usually after a heavy rain.
Those ponies, not horses, living there drink twice as much water as do normal horses. It is to purge out the high level of salt that they consume......also, the source of their characteristic 'pooch belly'.
"The most obvious difference between a horse and a pony is size. For most purposes, a pony is under 14.2 hands high if you ride English, and under 14 hands if you’re a western rider."
Horses are 15 hands are more.
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