Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part IV

Continued from the previous post regarding the horse and its so-called extinction in the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish.

Horses traveling in the opposite direction from human movement across the supposed land bridge called Beringia, causing the horse to become extinct, but other animals and humans to thrive in the Americas, from Canada to Argentina. Also note, that while the entire northern land mass was covered in a two-mile thick ice sheet, there was miraculously an ice-free corridor through it so people and animals could pass through the ice

Thus, mainstream scientists believe in the old paradigm that the genus Equus, which includes modern horses, zebras, and asses, is the only surviving genus in a once diverse family of horses that included 27 genera. The precise date of origin for the genus Equus is unknown, but evidence documents the dispersal of Equus from North America to Eurasia claimed to be approximately 2–3 million years ago and a possible origin at about 3.4–3.9 million years ago.
   It is also claimed by these mainstream scientists that while people migrated from west to east across the so-called Beringia Land Bridge from Siberia to Alaska/Canada, that the American horse, for some unknown reason, migrated in the opposite direction, from east to west across that Land Bridge, from Alaska to Siberia, and thus became extinct in the Americas but thrived in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Had this not have happened, these scientists claim, the horse would have faced complete extinction (Jay F. Kirkpatrick and Patricia M. Fazio, “Wild Horses as Naïve North American Wildlife,” Animal Welfare Institute, Washington DC, [Rev] 2010).
    It should also, in all fairness and reason, be pointed out that horse remains are not easily located in many areas where large number of horses are known to have existed. In some cases horses were anciently buried with or around humans in tombs, often for some transportation purposes in the next life, as the Egyptians buried boats with their deceased.
    It should be noted, that the mainstream scientific prevailing paradigm holds that there were no horses in the Americas during this time interval, that is after the last Ice Age (around 10,000 to 8000 BC), while the Book of Mormon and a number of native American oral traditions hold otherwise. While this mainstream paradigm has influenced archaeologists and the public conscience, it is by no means an accepted fact among all who had studied and debated the question.

Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, which opened in 1921, is one of America's premier natural history museums, which features the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered

In fact, the idea that horses could have survived into more recent times in areas south of Alaska and the Yukon was first suggested 40 years ago by Paul Sidney Martin, an American anthropologist and archaeologist, and lifelong associate of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He studied pre-Columbian cultures of the Southwestern United States, and excavated more than a hundred archaeological sites, though the Field Museum claims it was 69, starting with the groundbreaking seven-season expedition to the Montezuma County, Colorado, in 1930-1938 (The Paul S. Martin Collection Introduction, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago).
    His point was that “there was no reason why horses could not have survived in isolated areas of North America as late as 2000 B.C. (Paul S. Martin, "The Discovery of America," Science 179, 1973). To support this, we find that more recent discoveries are revealing that horses may have been present in North America much longer, even right up to the time when Europeans “reintroduced” horses to the Americas."
    With the passing of time, discoveries actually have actually revealed that horses survived in America as newer and newer scientific discoveries have kept pushing the supposed date of extinction of America's horses closer to the present day. Now it seems probable that there probably was no such extinction at all, since DNA analysis of a frozen Yukon Horse carcass found in the Alaskan permafrost in 2009 showed that horses were still living in North America as recently as 7,600 years ago (5600 BC), according to researcher Ross MacPhee, the American Museum of Natural History's Curator of Mammology.
    It should also be noted that “reintroduced horses” are claimed to have appeared in the Americas after the 1492 arrival of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus in the West Indies of the Caribbean, which began the control of vast territory for over three centuries by the Spanish. Their Empire would expand across the Caribbean Islands, half of South America, most of Central America and much of North America, including present day Mexico with their initial conquest of the Aztec Empire 1519-1521. This included Florida and the Southwestern and Pacific Coastal regions of what is now the United States.
    It is estimated that during the colonial period (1492–1832), a total of 1.86 million Spaniards settled in the Americas, with an estimated 250,000 in the 16th century, and most during the 18th century as immigration was encouraged by the new Bourbon Dynasty, one of the most important ruling houses of Europe, that in the 1600s was in France and Navarre (northern Spain near the French Border), and then by the 1800s, was also in Spain, Naples, Sicily and Parma. From their initial Caribbean landings, the Spanish moved southward from Mexico, into the Yucatan and then Guatemala and Honduras in their conquest of the Maya.

Map showing where (red circles) the Spanish conquests/battles took place and the dates of original occupation; also (yellow circles), where remains of Equus Horses have been found. Note the distance of the three (Horsethief Cave, Riddle Archaeological Site and Hemlock Park) specimen finds and the closest Spanish occupied area where horses would have been introduced. It is unlikely that feral horses would have wandered that far in a matter of a few years as claimed

Thus, horses dated to pre-1519 would obviously have been prior to the reintroduction of the heavy Spanish war horses. And those dated after the extinction period and before 1519, would have had to have been surviving horses in the Americas. However, it should also be kept in mind that just because a horse escaped into the wild in 1519 in Central Mexico, does not mean it is going to be found in Colorado or Wyoming or Canada, that same year, or likely for several years afterward. AS has been pointed out: “Given the history of European exploration and settlement in North America after 1492, it is next to impossible to expect horses to have been present in Wyoming before the major Spanish exploration in the Southern Plains of the mid-16th century or even the Spanish settlement in New Mexico in the early 17th century.”
    As was stated at the close of the last post, the fact is that there does appear to be archaeological support that horses existed in pre-Columbian America. To cover this material, we will start with what has been reportedly found in the Western Hemisphere.
North America:
• An Equus or horse specimen found in the Wolf Spider Cave, Colorado, claimed to have been dated to 1260-1400 AD, was identified by Elaine Anderson, of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (formerly the Denver Museum of Natural History), an expert in vertebrate paleontology and mammals (Russell William Graham and H. Gregory McDonald, “in Memoria: Elaine Anderson, 1936-2002,” Mammoth Trumpet, Vol.17, No.3:8-9, 2002; Marguerite Henry, All About Horses, Random House, New York, 1962).
• Two Equus samples have been found in Texas that date clearly in the time frame between the last ice age, 8000 BC, and the arrival of Columbus in 1492 AD, when there should be no horses at all in the Americas, according to the prevailing paradigm. The first of these was found in Pratt Cave near El Paso, Texas, by Professor Ernest Lundelius of Texas A&M University. This bone dated to 6020–5890 BC (two-sigma calibrated age). The date is corroborated by that of another Equus bone which was found deeper in the strata in the same cave, which dated to 10,230–10,030 BC.
• A horse bone found at Horsethief Cave in Wyoming, dated using thermoluminescent methods to approximately 3,124 BP (about 1120 BC). There was an attempt to have this bone re-dated using AMS methods which are more accurate, but there proved to be insufficient collagen in the bone to permit AMS dating. The 1100 BC date (although approximate) still stands.
• Daniel C. Peterson, Professor of Arabic, currently serving as Editor-in-Chief and Director of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, received his PhD from UCLA in Los Angeles, specializing in Middle Eastern Studies. He states: “horse bones have been found in a number of archaeological digs in historical strata.” As an example there have been some horse bones dated to the time of Christ that were found in the upper Midwest of the United States.”

Left: The large, heavy, war horse of the Conquistador was typically 15.5 hands or 62” in height and weighed about 1500 pounds; Right: a smaller but faster Indian pony or ranch horse, typically about 14  hands or 56” in height, and weighed about 900 pounds

Some of these bones have been found to be pre-Columbian, but post Book of Mormon, which is significant because the anthropological claim is that there were no horses in the new world from about 10,000 BC until the time of the Spanish arrival. However, Peterson claims there are a number found that have been dated to the 11^th century and the 13^th century, before Columbus, showing that horses were in the Americas long after the believed extinction date.
• About twelve years ago, Dr. Steven E. Jones, a former physics professor at BYU, began a project to seek horse bones from sites in North America and Central America for the purpose of radiocarbon dating. In this research, he was joined by Prof. Wade Miller of the BYU Department of Geology, archaeologists Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales and Shelby Saberon, and Patricia M. Fazio of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
    Forty-five Equus samples were obtained in Mexico. Based on AMS dating, there was one sample from the Ice Age period, and six from the post-Columbus period. Other samples had insufficient collagen, which locks in carbon-14, permitting accurate C-14 dating, thus not permitting accurate C-14 dating. By contrast, there were found Equus samples which do appear in the time frame between the last ice age and the arrival of Columbus in the area now known as the United States that fell within the time frame between the last ice age and the arrival of the Spanish (Frank Joseph, The Lost History of Ancient America, Career Press, Wayne NJ, 2017)
• A paper by Dr. R. Alison notes evidence for horses in Canada dating 900 and 2900 years ago. Though the compete extirpation of ancestral horse stock in Canada has yet to be completely confirmed and a bone found near Sutherland, Saskatchewan, at the Riddell archaeological site has been tentatively dated at about 2900 years ago (Canadian Museum of Nature I-8581)
• The bone. Another Equus sp. bone, found at Hemlock Park Farm, Frontenac County, Ontario, dates to about 900 years ago. Exhaustive confirmation of both bones has yet to be completed, but if they prove to be authentic, they comprise evidence that horses survived in Canada into comparatively modern times. Thus, there are a half dozen dated Equus samples that date in the time frame 6,000 BC to 1481 AD, well since the last ice age and all before Columbus.
• According to Frank Joseph in his Lost History of Ancient America, “using state-of-the-art darting methods, we, along with other researchers, have found radiometrically dated evidence for the existence of horses in North America long after the last ice age and before the arrival of Columbus. These data challenge the existing paradigm.”
(See the next post, “Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part IV,” for more information about horses in the Americas and why the mention of horses in the Book of Mormon is not an error or misjudgment but a statement of actual fact, and the horse remains found in Mesoamerica and South America)