Indigenous oral histories and archaeological evidence are rewriting the story of how horses came to the American West.
Centuries-old horse skeletons from the American Southwest are helping rewrite a colonial myth: When the Spanish colonized the region in the 17th century, they didn't introduce horses to Indigenous people, as long thought. Instead, horses were present in the Southwest long before Europeans, and were traded by Indigenous people who formed close, sacred relationships with them, a new study finds.
Using tools such as radiocarbon dating, ancient and modern DNA analysis and isotope analysis , a large and diverse team of researchers from 15 countries and multiple Native American groups, including members of the Lakota, Comanche and Pawnee nations, have now determined that horses did indeed spread across the continent earlier and faster than previously assumed.
The team discovered that two horses — one from Paa'ko Pueblo, New Mexico, and one from American Falls, Idaho — dated from the early 1600s, decades before Spanish settlers arrived in that area. By 1650, horses abounded in the Southwest and Great Plains, the researchers found.DNA comparisons between the historical horse skeletons and contemporary horse genomes revealed that they were closely related to Spanish horse bloodlines.
"Our findings have deep ramifications for our understanding of social dynamics in the Great Plains during a period of disruptive social changes for Indigenous peoples," the researchers wrote in their paper. For example, it had long been assumed that the Comanche people migrated south to acquire horses from the Spanish.
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