Native Americans already rode horses in the 17th century

March 31 () –

A DNA scan of archeological horse bones from across the American West reveals that indigenous peoples they had already developed an equestrian culture in the 17th century.

Horses populated the American continent in ancient times. But they became extinct about 10,000 years ago for unknown reasons. Spain reintroduced them after their arrival in America and these animals were reprobating the continent, both domesticated and wild. Native tribes incorporated them into their societies.

Using both new and established practices from the archaeological sciences, the team led by Professor William Taylor, Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, identified evidence that the horses were raised, fed, cared for and ridden by indigenous peoples. The results are published in Science.

An early date on a horse specimen from the Paa’ko Pueblo in New Mexico provides evidence for indigenous control of horses in the late 17th century, and possibly earlier.

Direct radiocarbon dating of discoveries from southern Idaho to southwestern Wyoming and northern Kansas demonstrated that horses were present across much of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains in the early 17th century, and conclusively before the Pueblo revolt of 1680. It was clear that the most common account of the origin of the modern American horse had to be corrected.

The genome analyzes not only addressed the development of horsemanship in First Nations during the early stages of American colonization. DNA evidence, for example, suggests that most of the indigenous horses had descended from Spanish horses. and British horses became more common in the 18th and 19th centuries.

These analyzes showed that the ancestry once dominant in the horse genome became diluted over time, gaining indigenous ancestry from British bloodlines. Thus, the changing landscape of colonial America was recorded in the horse’s genome: first mainly from Spanish sources and later mainly from British colonists.