Are Wild Horses Native to the Americas – Part I

It is believed that the last prehistoric North American horses died out between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago, at the end of what is called the Pleistocene (Ice Age). It is also assumed that by then the animal Equus (horse) had spread to Asia, Europe, and Africa. Of course, no one knows, or even has a workable idea as to why horses would have died out in North America.   

One of the questions regarding this disappearance of the horse in the Americas is “Did humans have a hand in their demise, or did climatic changes and altering vegetation trigger it?” If not, what did?
    Naturally, climate change, which has reached a new untenable and certainly unverifiable high in modern thinking, is one of the factors blamed for such changes or eradications of large mammals in the past.But another question also arises in this scenario.
    “How did the Equus get from North America to Asia and Europe before it met its untimely doom in the Americas?”
    Enter the infamous and so-called Siberian Land Bridge. While it is claimed that man came across that Land Bridge, which the anthropologist claims is a fact, but in geology has not been so proven, for there is no solid indication that a land bridge ever existed. But that does not stop the scientist from claiming that while man came from east to west across it, that the horse went from west to east across it.

The Ice Age Cordilleron sheet covered all of the western area of Canada, and the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered the rest, hardly allowing for any movement through them from east to west or west to east

A totally interesting and certainly unverifiable opinion when one considers, according to Stephen C. Lougheed and Natalie Morrill, of the Department of Biology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario Canada, that during the Ice Age at this time, it was solid ice throughout Alaska and Canada, and the northern part of the U.S. (“Quaternary History of Eastern Ontario: Impacts on Physical Landscape and Biota,” Reviewed by Paul Handford (Associate Professor, Ecology & Evolution Group, Biology Department, University of Western Ontario, and Professor Scott Lamoureux, Ph.D (Queen’s University, Geography and Planning, involved in research in the High Arctic,  climatology, paleoclimatology, geomorphology and sedimentology)
    According to Dale Guthrie, in Nature, the International weekly Journal of Science, “About 70% of North American large mammal species were lost at the end of the Pleistocene epoch,” and the causes of this extinction—the role of humans versus that of climate—“have been the focus of much controversy.” He further adds, “Horses have figured centrally in that debate, because equid species dominated North American late Pleistocene faunas in terms of abundance, geographical distribution, and species variety, yet none survived into the Holocene epoch” (“Rapid body size decline in Alaskan Pleistocene horses before extinction,” Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska).
    Yet, the $64-million question asked by Neil Clarkson, a Berigia Land Bridge advocate, is: “Why could the continent that gave rise to the horse in the first place no longer provide a suitable home?” But not just unsuitable, it was completely incapable, according to paleontologists. But even if an acceptable answer were to rise concerning this, one would have to ask why did the horse not simply migrate further south where it was already warm? What would draw the horse, one of the heartiest of large mammals in the wild, into the frozen tundra to weave its way haphazardly across a land bridge it could not possibly have known existed?
    One interesting, though highly speculative suggestion is that a cadre of comets exploded over North America about 12,900 years ago, as claimed by the University of Oregon researchers, causing the extinction of ice-age mammals and perhaps even the Clovis people in North America.

The hardy horse that once covered the entire landscape

It is interesting that after 25 million years of stable living, growing, expanding, improving and increasing, suddenly, without warning, or evidently without any suggestable reason, they simply disappeared. Yet, it is interesting that somehow, those who sought a home elsewhere, over the “land bridge” and in Asia and Europe, “were able to readily adapt to their new environment even though they could not survive in their own natural habitat” but the ones that stayed in North America could not adapt to whatever changes that had to have occurred, yet are not recorded in any type of modeling scenario. They evidently “faced a changing climate, altering vegetation, and the arrival of man.”
    According to the universityh of Colorado in Boulder, in a period known as the Clovis-age, man showed up in the area of present-day Colorado, arriving it is claimed over the so-called Beringia land bridge. “Biochemical testing of 13,000-year-old stone tools in Colorado show that some were used to butcher ice-age horses and camels that roamed North American until their extinction.” The cache of tools from the period were recently unearthed within the city limits of Boulder.
    All 83 artifacts were shipped to anthropology professor Robert Yohe, of the Laboratory of Archaeological Science at California State, Bakersfield, for the protein residue tests, who commented: “I was somewhat surprised to find mammal protein residues on these tools, in part because we initially suspected that the cache might be ritualistic rather than utilitarian.”
    There are so few Clovis-age tool caches that have been discovered that no one really knows very much about the culture. Anthropology professor Douglas Bamforth, who led the study at the University of Colorado, said the discovery of horse and camel protein on the tools was the clincher for him that the tools were of Clovis origin. “We haven’t had camels or horses around here since the late Pleistocene.”
    The artifacts that showed animal protein residues were each tested three times to ensure accuracy.

Stone tools claimed to be 13,000 years old

According to Bamforth, “The study is the first to identify protein residue from extinct camels on North American stone tools and only the second to identify horse protein residue on a Clovis-age tool.” As the University report pointed out, the collection of 83 stone implements has been named the Mahaffy Cache after the Boulder resident and landowner, Patrick Mahaffy, on whose property the items were found by a landscaping crew, headed by Brant Turney who dug up the items. The collection is one of only two Clovis caches—the other is from Washington state—that have been analyzed for protein residue from ice-age mammals.
    Another possible claim of change that resulted in the extinction of large animals was climate change—an “escape all” that is often cited for otherwise unexplainable events in science. In this case it is a little more elaborate. The extinction of the woolly mammoth, it is suggested (by whatever cause, perhaps by humans) changed the extensive grasslands to birch forests, and subsequent forest fires then changed the climate. As one scientist put it, “We now believe that immediately after the extinction of the mammoth that birch forests replaced the grasslands and that an era of significant fire began.”
(See the next post, “Are Wild Horses Native to the Americas – Part II,” for more information about the horse in the Americas when it was claimed to have been extinct)