FWIW:
Researchers theorize that the tiger horse may date back to ancient China around 618 AD. Many years later, these horses were imported into Europe and rose in popularity during the time Europeans were colonizing America. This resulted in Tiger Horses becoming known in America as well.
The Vikings are believed to have traveled to North America long before the Spaniards (as far back as 1000 AD). They brought their horses with them to Iceland; they may well have brought them to North America too.
Anyone remember what year the ponies were shipwrecked and swam ashore on Assateague?
Iāve visited with my husband LāAnse aux Meadows at the northern tip of Newfoundland, where Vikings definitely were present in a small settlement in the 11th century. (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/4/)
We took the excellent tour that was available (and I was very impressed with the level of information at all the Canadian sites we visited). What they said was that the Vikings who were there were not as permanent settlers; instead they came to harvest timber which they then took back to Iceland to build houses etc. They did not mention any horses that they might have brought with them although they did have some smaller livestock, probably kept for food.
That seems to fit in with the history of the Newfoundland Pony having descended from British stock.
There is a not very well supported theory that there were very small bands of horses living in the upper foothills along the Rockies that were the descendants of the original horses from thousands of years before. When the Spanish horses got loose they supposedly bred with them, leading to the mustangs there today.
Itās a nice idea, and in theory possible, but I have an issue with it in that native storytelling is extremely reliable and there are no mention of horses before the 1500ās in any native oral history I am familiar with. So these bands of horses would have had to been so small and so irrelevant that native peoples did not even mention them. That seems unlikely.
While we tend to think of the settlement of the North American continent as one of steady westward movement, the fact is that the Spanish were in what is now California well before Jamestown or
the Mayflower landing in Plymouth. There is still no evidence that horses in their modern form were available to the Native population until the arrival of the Spanish.
The Spanish were also in Florida before the English were in Jamestown.
Iāve never heard of any horses left in that area, though.
Sigh. Something more to researchā¦
When did the Chincoteague Ponies land at Assateague, i wonder?
According to this article, the shipwreck of a Spanish Galleon off the coast of Virginia that resulted in the Chincoteague ponies on Assateague Island was much later than the era we are talking about - 1750
A year or two ago I went down this same huge rabbit hole about whether or not there were living pre-Spanish horses in North America. The fossil evidence of the early horse ancestor Eohippus is pretty well documented to have evolved in the Americas and then spread across the land bridge to Asia and Europe, the opposite of human evolution and migration - and the horse spread into Asia and Europe much earlier than humans spread into the Americas.
I read the entire PhD thesis that argues that the Plains Horse Tribes did not learn horsemanship from the Spanish, and it is actually quite convincing. It was written by a Native American and interviewed multiple other Native Americans about their oral traditions, and goes through an extensive lit review (although more from a sociological slant than a science slant). It argues that history (and science) is dominated by European white culture (true) and that the Spanish insisted that the existing peoples of the Americas were less superior than Europeans, hence why it was OK to colonize and build missions to convert them to Catholicism and exploit their resources and labor.
The primary source of the PhD thesis is worth the read.
The thing that got me the most was the timeline - Columbus landed in the Carribbean in 1492, and the Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes landed in mainland North America (Mexico) in 1519 with 500 men and 15 horses, marched to Tenochititlan (Mexico City). Thenā¦ in 1522 (so three years later) a Spanish slave trader and captain reported seeing native peoples with horses off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas. There are no records of those 15 horses being stolen (we have journals from one of Cortesās soliders, written in Spanish, about his conquest of Mexico. And if one of their warhorses had been stolen it would have been recorded. Those horses were weapons of war and pivotal to how they conquered the Aztec nation and Moctezuma). There are many legends in Native American culture about āElk-Dogsā - which this PhD thesis argues were horses.
It is worth a read, especially when you consider the amount of censoring and suppression of Indigenous culture through history.
https://www.proquest.com/openview/1b40a9128eaba2e22ab3fed4cf6551a8/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
And there were definitely living equines (skeletons almost identical to the modern horse of today) in California at the end of the last Ice Age, as found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California. At the end of the last Ice Age is when humans started migrating into the Americas over the Alaskan land bridge. Californiaās grasslands definitely evolved with big grassland herbivores including horses, bison, camels, etc. The La Brea Tar Pits are a fascinating place to visit.
āAbout as big as a mustang, Equus occidentalis, which means āWestern horseā, reflects that evolution. In fact, their skeletons are so similar to modern horses, that archaeologists and paleontologists can have a difficult time telling them apart. E. occidentalis starts appearing in the fossil record around 500,000 years ago, and has been found in abundance at La Brea Tar Pits with over 200 individuals recovered. They were stout, stocky creatures, resembling modern East African zebras and the extinct South African quagga, despite not being closely related to either animal.ā
So it is not outside the realm of possibility that there could have been relic herds of non-Spanish horses before the Spanish conquest of Mexico, that cross-bred with the Iberian horses the Spanish brought. The legends of the Nez Perce (the Tribe in the mountains of Idaho, the northern Rockies) about the origin of the Appalooosa definitely never say they got them from the Spanish.
And this fossil find seems to place living horses in the Americas (Nevada desert) at 12,000 years ago. That does overlap with humans migrating into the Americas.
Intriguing rabbit holeā¦
Even if horses were entirely extinct in north America by the time Europeans arrived, if people here had overlapped with them in the past it seems reasonable that a cultural memory of that would persist. Europeans know about things from the distant past after all, myths and legends often emerge from real events that are retold over time.
THANK YOU @Caligirl83 for giving us this paper.
Even though I am 72 I am still capable of learning new ideas, and this ānewā idea is truly mind blowing considering what I was taught and read my whole life. This is equivalent to the mind blowing experience I got from reading āThe Hot Blooded Dinosaursā book back in the 1970s, giving me a whole new way of looking at life and the world.
My brain is digesting this. I wonder how many horse breeds in North and South America have these horses in their ancestry. Considering that the Canadians threw their domesticated horses out to forage in the forests during winter, and that many Canadian horses made it down into the US colonies (Justin Morganās dam may have been a Canadian mare), I am now wondering how many of our wonderful North American breeds of horses carry genes from these native pre-Columbian horses, plus of course the Quarter horses descended from colonial era horses from the East Coast.
Mind blowing for sure. There is so much that we do not know.
I donāt think these timelines are actually that contentious. My understanding of the evidence science and anthropology can offer at this time is that the North American horse went extinct around 10,000 years ago, along with a whole lot of other species of mega-fauna. The 12,000 year old fossils fit that. Whether the mass extinction was down to climate events, human predation, all of the above, who knows.
As far as I am aware, there is no physical evidence of domestication, as ridden/draught animals, anywhere in the world until you get to circa 5000 years ago, on the steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
If people and horses co-existed in North America 10,000 years ago, chances are high that the people were eating them, making stuff out of their hides and bones, etc. etc. Probably not ridingā¦
The Hot Blooded Dinosaurs book is amazing @Jackie_Cochran!
I find it always intriguing when there is a seminal paradigm shift theory or evidence. Makes the brain think. 
@Caol_Ila I agree with you, but thatās not the timeline I find contentious (or intriguing). I too have always accepted that timeline as fact, and Iām not saying I am accepting one PhD thesis in Indigenous Studies at the University of Alaska Indigenous Studies as the bible. But I too had a paradigm shifting PhD thesis, and the status quo of science is invested in not changing the accepted paradigm.
What made me not totally dismiss the PhD thesis was the thought that how in the world were there native peoples riding horses in Georgia or the Carolinas THREE YEARS after Cortes landed on mainland North America in Veracruz, Mexico. Cortes came from Cuba in 1519. He was busy conquering TenochtitlĆ”n (what would become Mexico City) until 1520. I just donāt see how an entire horse riding culture could emerge in three years and spread all the way north past the extreme deserts of northern Mexico and Texas (I have driven through this desert) to Georgia and the Carolinas. Itās possible maybe the Spanish slaver in 1522 saw something else that he mistook for natives on horses. But it took a long time for the horse cultures of Europe and Asia to develop. Def not three years, five or ten. Thatās the part of the timeline that made me sit down and think that maybe western Anglo history should be taken with a grain of salt, since history is always written by the conquerors.
For curiosityās sake, Iām going to pull this article from the 1950s, just waiting on the interlibrary loan. Iām curious now to know when the first recorded escape or theft of horses from the Spanish was documented in the Spanish military journals.
Denhardt, Robert M. āThe Horse in New Spain and the Borderlands.ā Agricultural History , vol. 25, no. 4, 1951, pp. 145ā50. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/3740963.
This is an area of active research and I hope it is being well funded. Iām so glad there is a push to incorporate indigenous oral histories of their creation into our Western scientific understanding of the world.
How interesting. As far as the three years quandary, native peoples had extensive trade networks, like, Mexica people were regularly getting turquoise from what is now Arizona and New Mexico on the regular, so perhaps ideas and goods can travel faster and farther than we think. The trade routs were really efficient .
Indeed.
I think the fallacy Euro-centric history has propulgated about the Americas isnāt that horses survived the Ice Age, but that the people who lived there were in primitive tribes, simple, undeveloped, and vastly inferior to the European colonists. Justifies taking their land! The reality was that it was a well-developed civilisation, with trade routes and its own complexities, more than capable of making use of these new animals brought from Spain, trading them, and breeding them.
This is such an interesting topic!
For anybody that is curious, you can create a free JSTOR account and read up to 100 free articles if you donāt have academic library access. Here is that 1950s article that I had mentioned above talks a lot about the Spanish expansion of horses and the huge ranching culture that developed in 25 years in the West Indies after Colombus landed, and helped set up Cortesā conquest of Mexico with horses. So I suppose if there were so many horses in the West Indies between 1492 and 1519 that may explain how there could have been natives riding horses in Georgia or the Carolinas in 1522. Trade networks were definitely extensive! Detailed descriptions of how they brought them over on ships from Spain in slings, and then if the ship was becalmed and the sailors ran out of water they had to toss the horses overboard, hence the āhorse latitudesā - poor horses!
Denhardt, Robert M. āThe Horse in New Spain and the Borderlands.ā Agricultural History , vol. 25, no. 4, 1951, pp. 145ā50. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/3740963
And then I found this quite fascinating article from Mormon researchers trying to place ancient horses being ridden or used as draft animals in the Americas in early Mayan culture, since apparently including ridden horses is a controversial part of the Book of Mormon? Really interesting, although of course this is from a religious perspective. But they in detail go into the number of horses brought to the mainland by early Spanish expeditions and what happened to them.
Johnson, D. (2015). āHardā Evidence of Ancient American Horses. BYU Studies Quarterly , 54 (3), 149ā179. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43957217
It was around 1971. 3 stallions were exported to Denmark. 2 of the 3 were used but not often as the Danes didnāt like the type.
That is why we are allowed to cross to other approved outcrosses and not Appy.
And that no trace of that remnant population shows up in the genetics.
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