DNA and skeletal clues rewrite the tale of how horses came to the Great Plains by the 1600s
An image of a Native American man standing next to a brown horse while other brown horses mill in the background.
A collaboration between Western scientists and Native Americans finds that Indigenous groups rapidly incorporated horses of Spanish ancestry into Great Plains cultures by the early 1600s. Some Indigenous oral histories say their relationship with horses goes back even farther to possible equine survivors of the Ice Age.
SACRED WAY SANCTUARY
By Bruce Bower
MARCH 30, 2023 AT 2:00 PM
Indigenous knowledge and Western science have written a new tale about when horses most recently arrived in North America.
Spaniards brought horses to Mexico in 1519. Indigenous peoples then took the reins, rapidly transporting offspring of those equine newcomers north along trade routes. As a result, a new study finds, many Native American populations across the Great Plains and the Rockies had incorporated horses into their ways of life by the early 1600s, decades before encountering any Europeans.
This unconventional scenario of how domesticated horses originally spread throughout central and western North America bucks a previous narrative: European written accounts dating mainly to the 1700s and 1800s had contended that horses first spread into North America in large numbers after Pueblo people temporarily drove Spanish settlers out of New Mexico in 1680. But little evidence existed to confirm or deny that claim.
Europeans’ historical texts didn’t ring true for molecular archaeologist Yvette Running Horse Collin of the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. Running Horse Collin is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Great Plains populations such as the Lakota and Comanche speak of having cared for, herded and otherwise interacted with horses long before Europeans showed up.
Running Horse Collin contacted Toulouse colleague Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist who has traced the origins of domesticated horses to southwestern Asia more than 4,200 years ago (SN: 10/20/21). The duo organized a large collaboration of Western scientists and Indigenous scholars and officials, including members of the Lakota, Comanche, Pawnee and Pueblo Nations.
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/native-americans-spanish-horses
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