Horses were part of North America before the Europeans arrived, study shows

There’s a reason horses are so iconic to the American West and Southwest, and now there’s scientific data to back it up.

A new study published in the journal Science suggests horses called North America home decades before European colonizers arrived, confirming oral histories passed through Indigenous nations and ending a rather contentious debate.

A team of more than 80 archaeologists, geneticists, historians and scientists from the Lakota, Comanche and Pawnee nations analyzed horse bones from museums across the Great Plains and Northern Rockies, according to the study. They found horses were fundamental to the people of these nations who fed, cared for, bonded with and ultimately buried them after they died.

That’s because the people of these nations, including the Lakota, considered horses to have a “nationhood status equal to their own,” the study says.

“The Lakota-horse relationship is thus one of great reverence, deeply embedded in their identity, spirituality, science, and cosmogony,” authors wrote in the study. “The horse enhanced the abilities of the Lakota with regard to hunting, mobility, healing, and more.”

The University of Colorado Boulder, where one of the study’s co-authors is a researcher, suggested it could be “the most exhaustive history of early horses in North America to date” in a news release.

“What unites everyone is the shared vision of telling a different kind of story about horses,” co-author William Taylor said in the release. “Focusing only on the historical record has underestimated the antiquity and the complexity of Indigenous relationships with horses across a huge swath of the American West.”

Skeletal specimens showed horses were present in the grasslands in the early 1600s, long before the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, “which was the earliest date accepted by Western science,” the study says.

Scientists believe horses may have made their way to North America through “ancient trade routes based on kinship ties and social networks established through the Great Plains and Rockies millennia before European contact,” the study says.

The study included quotes from Lakota Chief Joe American Horse.

“Horses have been part of us since long before other cultures came to our lands, and we are a part of them,” Chief Joe American Horse said in the study. “We stand with the horse and we will always do so however it has evolved through its journey. That is what being Lakota is.”

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