Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part VII

Continued from the previous post regarding the horse and horse remains found in the Americas, with specific evidences found in North, Central and South America. However, despite this recently uncovered knowledge of the past 50 years or so, scientists still hold on to their paradigm of horses becoming extinct in the Americas around 10000 BC. However, much has been learned to question and then discredit that old theory.
    Take as an example, the fact that on three separate occasions, according to the Vinland Sagas the Norse explorers Bjarni Herjólfsson, Leif Erickson, and Thorfinn Karlsefni Þórðarson settled in North America at Baffin Island, Markland, and Vinland for nearly a year on the North American east coast (Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, The Vinland Sagas, Penguin, New York, 1965).
    These days, of course, the fact that Norse explorers reached the Americas is almost as well-known as Columbus's own voyages. However, only fifty years ago, the Norse exploration of the Americas was still just a theory, rooted in an interpretation of the old Norse sagas. These were tales, often filled with epic poems, written roughly between 1190 and 1320, describing events of a couple hundred years before, from about 930 to 1030, the events of which had previously only been recounted in oral histories.

The areas of Greenland, Helluland, Markland and Vinland where the Norse reached and claim to have settled for a short time

According to The Saga of the Greenlanders, after their marriage, and at Gudrid’s urging, the two led an attempt to settle Vínland with sixty men, five women, and a cargo of various livestock. While in Vínland, the couple had a son whom they named Snorri Þórðarson, who became the first European reported to be born in the Western Hemisphere (Donald Logan, The Vikings in History: Third Edition. Routledge, New York, 2005).
    The interesting part of this saga is that despite all of this, particularly the presence of some sixty immigrant/explorers, and a “cargo of various livestock,” such as horses, cows, goats, etc., not a single bone or remains of a any such animals have been found in the various locations attributed to the Norse settlements (William J. Hamblin, “Basic Methodological Problems with the Anti-Mormon Approach to the Geography and Archaeology of the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol.1, No.2, 1993, pp161-197).
    It should also be noted that Leif Erickson wintered in Vinland in 1001 and 1002, and most certainly would have had some domestic animals with him to survive through those two winters. Leif’s brother Thorvald returned to Vinland in 1004, bringing with him 30 men who wintered their before returning to Greenland. The sagas describe that the only real attempt by the Vikings to set up a permanent settlement in the Americas came in 1009, when Thorfinn Karlsefni set off with roughly 200 men and women and plenty of livestock. The sagas record some successful bartering between the Norse and the Native Americans, but for some reason peaceful relations broke down. Ultimately, the Norse were driven from the Americas.

An ancient abandoned Norse settlement on Greenland from which Eric the Red left to sail to Vinland (Nova Scotia) and Markland (New Brunswick), as well as Leif and Thorvald and others

However, despite this, the vast numbers of people and animals brought to the east coast of North America by the Norse, no bones of any kind, animal or human, have yet been found there. Of course, there are numerous reasons why remains have not been found, one of which is the type of soil in which artifacts become buried. As one non-LDS scholar, a Basque-Israeli-American anthropologist, linguist, and writer who was born in Ecuador, and an authority on ancient America stated: “the Olmecs had domesticated dogs and turkeys but the damp acidic Mesoamerican soil would have destroyed any remains and any archaeological evidence of such animal domestication” (Benjamin Urrutia, “Lack of Animal Remains at Bible and Book-of-Mormon Sites,” Newsletter and Proceedings of the Society for Early Historic Archaeology, Vol.150, August 1982, pp3-4).
    Archaeologist John Edward Clark, who received his Ph.D at the University of Michigan, and currently is a professor of Anthropology at BYU as well as the Director of the New World Archaeological Foundation, has expressed similar concerns,  stating during a Q&A session following a presentation at BYU: “The problem is archaeologists get in the same hole that everybody else gets in. If you find a horse–if I’m digging a site and I find a horse bone—if I actually know enough to know that it is a horse bone, because that takes some expertise—my assumption would be that there’s something wrong with my site. And archaeologists who find a horse bone will say, “Ah! Somebody’s screwing around with my archaeology.” So we would never date it. Why am I going to throw away $600 to date the horse bone when I already know [that they’re modern]?...I think that hole’s screwed up. If I dig a hole and I find plastic in the bottom, I’m not going to run the [radio]carbon, that’s all there is to it, because I don’t want to waste the money” (Q&A session following John E. Clark’s presentation, “Archaeology, Relics, and Book of Mormon Belief,” 25 May 2004 at BYU).

Norse horses roamed Markland ( New Brunswick) anciently 

In addition, pre-Columbian horse remains that shown no signs yet of fossilization have actually been found in several sites on the Yucatan Peninsula ["Once Again the Horse," FARMS Update, June 1984; John W. Welch, Reexploring the Book of Mormon, Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, 1992, pp98-100).
    The point of all of this is that despite mainstream science claiming that horses became extinct in the Americas around the period they claim as 10000 BC, after the last Ice Age, there is mounting evidence that the horse continued to survive, and perhaps thrive, in the Americas up to about the time that Columbus reached the Caribbean islands, and the Spanish conquistadors reached Mexico and South America. As John L. Sorenson, a long time archaeologist professor at BYU has stated: “The problem may be one of pre-conceived paradigms.” This is certainly likely, since mainstream scientists have developed an erroneous paradigm regarding the arrival of man in the Western Hemisphere, how he got there, and who he was.
    There is no question that archaeologists in the field, upon finding or hearing about horse remains in the Americas, immediately consider it either a pre-Ice Age Equus, or one that was brought by the Spanish and introduced into the New World. In their minds, there is simply no possibility that such remains could be post Ice Age and pre-Columbian. Such attitudes, since the beginning of time, had often squelched true research, correct findings, and the advancement of truth if it did not fit the established and long-held beliefs of time, including the geologic time scale.
    “The first paleontological site in North America was probably at Big Bone Lick, which is now Big Bone Lick State Park near the Ohio River in Union, Kentucky. A French commander organized a dig there in 1739. Bones retrieved by him were sent to the Natural History Museum in Paris, France. In the 1960’s, the University of Nebraska conducted another dig and several mammal fossils were recovered including: possible wolf and black bear, modern bison, ancient bison, two types of musk ox, American moose, wapiti elk, common Virginia deer, extinct stag moose, caribou, flatheaded peccary, extinct North American horse, possible tapir, American mastodon, woolly mammoth, and two types of giant ground sloth. The most common fossil found at the Big Bone Lick dig was the modern bison.”

Big horn sheep gather around a natural mineral lick at Big Horn Lick where ancient animals continually frequented, where predators also congregated

Speaking of the Big Bone Lick dig, Charles Lyell stated that the greater portion, both of the entire skeletons or extinct animals, and the separate bones, have been taken up from black mud about twelve feet below the level of the creek. It is supposed that the bones of mastodons found here could not have belonged to less than one hundred distinct individuals, those of the fossil elephant (E. primigenius), to twenty, besides which, a few bones of a stag, horse, megalonyx, and bison, are stated to have been obtained…In regard to the horse, it may probably have differed from our Equus caballus as much as the zebra or wild ass, in the same manner as that found at Newberne in North Carolina appears to have done (Charles Lyell, Lyell’s Travels in North America in the Years 1841-1842, C.E. Merrill Co, New Yorik, 1909, p142).
    However, it should be noted that in the Milwaukee Public Museum there is the skull of a mustang excavated in 1936 by W.C. McKern from a mound on Spencer Lake in NW Wisconsin (47BT2), who stated: “there remains no reasonable question as to the legitimacy of the horse skull that we found as a burial association placed in the mound by its builders” (McKern, Wisconsin Archaeologist, Vol.45, No.2 , June 1964, pp. 118-120.
    So we find that the skull was associated with the burial mound, and the mound was pre-Columbian. At present one can only conclude that the horse was pre-Columbian. In fact, the C-14 dates on stuff (technical term for charcoal, charred wood, and charred bone) from the mound are all pre-Columbian, with 8 items ranging from the Earliest dated from AD 490 +/- 120 to the latest dated AD 1100 +/- 100, which means all the bones were found to be dated between as early as 370 AD to the lastest 1200 AD. All of which were pre-Columbian and post extinction period (University of Michigan, in RadioCarbon Vol. 10, 1968, pp61, 72-73).