I’m intrigued by the connection between Appaloosas and horses from Kazakstan.
I haven’t had a chance to follow up with these scientific theories. Are they saying horses were domesticated in Kazakstan 10,000 years ago and ancient people migrated with them over the land bridge? If people were using horses as beasts of burden, it makes sense that they came across with them to the Americas.
I love the idea, but I also know how hit and miss genetic testing is. Also that “Arabian” or Turkmen or Akhal Teke blood was traded around Europe from the middle ages on, and was foundational to the English TB and also the barn/ Iberian breeds. So anything horses descended from Spanish imports could show these genetics. And of course some lines of modern appaloosas were crossed with TB.
Do not confuse E. occidentalis with the Modern Horse. IF there were “horses” available to the paleoindians, they were E. occidentalis or the unnamed horse mentioned in the second article, not the modern horse. They probably could nto even have even crossbred.
Interestingly, prezwalkskis horse can create fertile hybrids with the modern horse. While as we know, mules are sterile and also zebra horse hybrids.
Different number of pairs of chromosomes yet produce fertile offspring? That is unusual indeed. Wiki does a pretty good job talking about the taxonomy and lineage of the Przewalski’s horse.
But, if ancient wild “horses” here available to the PaleoAmericans, which then presumably interbred with the horses left by the Spanish, wouldn’t there be vestiges of that DNA found in mustangs?
If the original horses had the same number of chromosomes, there might be nothing that jumped out in the DNA
May be interesting to consider that no genetic traces of indigenous dogs remain in the Americas except the Inuit dog. The native dogs died out from disease and being killed by colonists. Just a point about no genetic trace of pre-Colombian equids in modern horses.
An interesting post I came across on Facebook.
I screenshotted it for those without FB, as I couldn’t figure out how to copy the text
.
This refers to a Science study co-authored by William Taylor. I googled, and the only one I found was from a year ago (March 2023), the one picked up by many articles linked earlier in this thread, though I don’t see the Science article itself (so I have linked it at the bottom of this post).
Do you know of a more recent publication?
Because last year’s article just seems to move the acquisition of horses a century or two earlier, with (reasonably enough) the indigenous inhabitants being responsible for their diffusion to North America far ahead of the advance of Europeans — as discussed upthread.
Honestly, I had never heard of the Pueblo revolt theory before this thread, and when I did it seemed very strange to me that it would take nearly 200 years for horses to escape Spanish control.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adc9691
(Interesting that they could actually see a switch from Spanish to British genetics at the time American colonists reached the Great Plains.)
@avjudge Thanks for posting the Science article, I agree it doesn’t seem like anything new has been published upon doing a quick search. That FB post just came across my feed so I thought it was interesting. There seems to be some passionate cultural issues at play if you dig deep on the internet.
I think that is a possibility. But the indigenous people were not riding them. If anything, before the Spanish, they would have hunted them. I think we have pretty solid knowledge about how riding horses changed so many tribes.
We often forget how early the Spanish were in North America and how pervasive their influence was over the American Southwest. Horses would have been moving around in the 1500s while English settlement on the East Coast only starts in the 1600s, and English settlers aren’t present in the Southwest until the later 1800s. So there’s a good 350 years of potential horse culture before Anglo-Americans are around.
When Simon Fraser came through BC in 1807, the Chilcotin Indigenous groups already had a long established horse culture in a good rangeland environment. But horses never made it to the coast likely because it is a nasty muddy place to try to keep horses 
and pre-conquest wouldn’t have open fields.
I love love love the idea of The Horse Nation parallel to the human nations.
The Ojibwe used a small horse as a pack animal and companion. Their spirit horse.
Would these horses have been the same as, or related to, Przewalski’s Horse, I wonder?
No we don’t. And the Spanish were also in the Southeast very early on. St Augustine predates the British colonies on the East Coast, and my home state, Georgia, was founded partly as a buffer colony between Florida and Carolina.
Well what about the Vikings? Did they bring any horses to these shores as they did to Iceland?
That is explicitly addressed in the Science article I posted, at least as far as they can know: “There is, however, no direct evidence that Viking horses reached settlements on the mainland ( 11 ).” It is not impossible, but without evidence there is no reason to say it happened.
Also, thinking of the indigenous cultures for which the horse was an important part, as far as I know those were all far from areas we know the Vikings visited.
Edit to add:
I should add to my posts that while I am skeptical of horses surviving their supposed extinction in North America, as opposed to being re-introduced in the 16th century, I am skeptical in the sense of “show me some proof,” not in the denialist sense.
When unexpectedly old human footprints were found in New Mexico, there were some doubts about the accuracy of the dating. Scientists didn’t sit on their hands and say “it doesn’t sound right to me” or “of course it was right!” They thought about different ways to date the footprints, and when the different methods gave the same result, the age of the footprints was widely accepted.
I also think about evidence of horses in relation to some things I have read about dogs in the Americas pre-European contact. A few years ago a study found that there is nearly no modern genetic evidence of the dogs that came with earlier inhabitants – that is, except for some tiny regional populations, current dogs get all their DNA from dogs brought to this country in the last several centuries, mostly from Europe. Yet studying older skeletons in a very similar method to the Science article study of horse skeletons has yielded DNA that is a closer match to dogs in Siberia. This is what the study of horse skeletons has so far failed to do. (Not the relation to Siberia part, obviously, but the not-European part.)
On the question of the Vikings and their horses:
I’ve visited the site in Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows where there is an excellent national museum on the historic site of the Viking settlement.
Here’s the link: L’Anse aux Meadows
There’s no evidence that the Vikings brought any horses with them. The Vikings were, apparently, mostly there to harvest timber to take back to Iceland for building purposes. So, they weren’t really settling there, they were using it as an encampment while they cut down trees and prepared them to be shipped back.
How long ago did the Icelandic horses arrive in Iceland? Where did they come from? Since the Ojibwa lived along the St Lawrence River and Great Lakes region, is the Icelandic horse a possible source of the Ojibwa horse? Trade was robust in that region dating way back to the time of trappers.
From a Canadian website, researchers that tested genetics of the Ojibwa horse found:
“Maternal lineages in native Canadian equine populations and their relationship to the
Nordic and Mountain and Moorland pony breeds”
Some really interesting questions…
Out of curiosity, I’ve scanned the web, trying to find theories on the origin of these horses by someone who doesn’t have a proverbial dog in the fight.
Mostly, I’ve found a lot of rubbish journalism, like even Equus magazine saying the primitive markings – leg bars and dorsal stripes – are a “unique characteristic” of the Ojibwa horse. I mean, that’s not remotely true. As I’m sure most COTHers know, primitive markings are pretty common in horses carrying the dun gene or the nd1 gene. Both my PRE and my Highland have dorsal stripes, leg barring, and shoulder bars. I don’t think that means anything…other than that there’s dun/nd1 in the population.
I haven’t found the article you quoted, but that makes a lot of sense. A few of the articles I’ve skimmed have related that their short stature, hairy coat, and tiny, furry ears are “unique” characterstics (that word again! More rubbish journalism!). Stating the obvious again – that could be describing most of the Mountain/Moorland breeds from Northern Europe.
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