Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part VI

Continued from the previous post regarding the horse and horse remains found in the Americas, and specifically South America, since North America and Central America have been discussed in previous posts.
South America: 
    First of all, it should be noted that in the area of Andean South America, numerous bones of horses and other animals have been found in tar seeps and tar pits, the latter like those of La Brea, California. Equus horse bones have been found in a tar seep location that preserved a dense assemblage of megafaunal remains in hydrocarbon-saturated sediments along with microfaunal and paleobotanical material, that has a claimed date between 15000 and 21000 BC.

Ecuadorian Tar Pits where numerous animal remains have been found throughout Ecuador

Located in the Tanque Loma, Ecuador, along the Santa Elena peninsula (which contains some of the best-preserved assemblages of megafaunal remains known). The entire site, which has produced over 1000 bones, though not a single carnivore among them (Emily L. Lindsay and Eric X. Lopez, “Tanque Loma, a new late-Pleistocene megafaunal tar seep locality from southwest Ecuador,” Journal of South American Earth Sciences, Vol.57, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands, January 2015; pp61-82).
    Other locations where these bones have been found is in the Inter-Andean Basin, Quito, Bolivar, Corralito, and the Carchi Province; as well as others in Peru. One of the latter is that of Talara, about 40 miles northwest of Piura, along the coast where a tar trap contained a fossil horse jaw, along with 28,000 bones, including elephants, horses and carnivores (K. Seymour, Perusing Talara; Overview of the Late Pleistocene fossils from the tar seeps of Peru,” Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Science Series, Vol.42, 2015, pp97-109).
    While it is true that the dates involved are about the end of the Ice Age, it should be kept in mind that there were no ice sheets in South America during the Last Glacial Maximum north of Chilean Patagonia. There was ice along the peaks of the Andes in Peru, but the area of the above tar pit and seeps were located along the coast, which during the Last Ice Age was considered “Tropical Desert” or “Tropical Grassland” or “Temperate Steppe Grassland.” The point being, there would have been no reason for any horses in western South America to have become extinct as in the far north of North America where the glaciers were located. Thus this concept of Equus horse becoming extinct throughout South America, even Central America and Mexico to the Central Plains of North America, is hardly valid.
    In addition, and more to the point of the time period between the Ice Age and the arrival of the Spanish, Sebastian Cabot (Sebastiano Caboto or Gaboto) son of Venetian navigator and explorer John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) whose 1497 discovery of the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VIII of England, brings us a knowledge of horses in South America during the recent age of man. While his father’s discovery was the first European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century, Sebastian, who was with his father in North America, mounted his own explorations of South America.

Left: John Cabot in traditional Venetian clothing, discovering the Canadian east coast of North America in 1497; Right: Sebastian Cabot, son of John, and navigator and cartographer who sailed to South America in 1526 along the Argentina coast and upriver on the Rio de la Plata; and the Paraná River into Uruguay

After his father's death, Sebastian Cabot conducted his own voyages of discovery, seeking the Northwest Passage in 1508-1509 through North America for England. He later sailed for Spain, traveling to South America, where he explored the Rio de la Plata (known originally as Mar Dulce) in Argentina and the Paraná River into Uruguay. As a cartographer, Sebastian detailed the lands of Southern South America, inserting a sketch of a horse in the rolling grasslands of Argentina on his World Map of 1544, which sketches were intended to portray the primary assets of each region. Consequently, it seems certain that he noted the presence of vast herds of horses in Argentina during his sailing there in 1526. Sebastian’s expedition into Argentina took place just ten years after the Spanish expedition by major (Senior) pilot Juan Diaz de Solis to the Rio de Plata—neither expedition had horses on board their ships, and neither of the parties spent but brief moments on any inland shore.

Sebastian Cabot’s 1533 drawing on his "Tabula del gran río" map of the horse, a jaguar, and a parrot accurately drawn along the Paraná River

In fact, since his maps, as well as all those of that period, used symbols, animals or characters to demonstrate something indigenous about the land depicted, it would have been without merit to have placed horses in the land of Argentina on Sebastian’s map if these were Spanish or European horses, since they would not have represented the land. Consequently, the presence of a horse on a land in a 1544 map could only mean that such an animal well represented the land drawn. To support these being indigenous horses, later settlers in this land noted that the Argentine horse was nothing like the Spanish horse, and had an unusually comfortable walking gait; so they named these mounts Paso Fino (meaning “Walks Good”). This, by the way, matches the previously mentioned special pre-Columbian horses found among the Chickasaws,” which had a smooth-walking gait as did horses found in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida that were called “Seminole ponies” or “prairie ponies” in North America.
    Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, who was a British authority on zoology, and who held chairs at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, wrote in a book published in 1910: “It is also said that the Araucanian Indians of Patagonia have a peculiar breed of ponies, which may be derived in part from a native South American stock” (Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair, Methuen, London, 1910—there have been 59 editions of this book published between 1910 and 2013).
    It should also be noted that the existence of ancient, indigenous horses on the American continent was only first accepted in 1848, when Richard Owen described a fossil horse from South America. The first scientific paper on ancient horses in the Americas was published that same year by American paleontologist, parasitologist and anatomist Joseph Leidy, professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and later professor of natural history at Swarthmore College.
    However, horse fossils, bones, and teeth have now been found in North, Central, and South America. Unfortunately for this solution for the Book of Mormon, however, mainstream scholars typically see such theories as unworthy fringe writing and claims among questionable writers. Due to the lack of acceptance through archaeological support of numerous well-founded and well-carried out efforts in the Americas, most scholars continue to believe that horses became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene period.

A group of archaeologists using ArchaeChemis equipment involved in Archaeology and Archaeometry studies, which include chemical solitons in Archaeometry

 

Much of this was reported by Dr. Steven Jones of BYU in his work on finding evidence of pre-Columbian and post extinct horses in the Americas. The problem lies in mainstream science ridiculing Dr. Jones and his extensive work and writing. It might be of interest to give a little background on the man being so maligned in his reporting. Professor Jones was a full Professor of Physics at Brigham Young University, where he served for over 21 years before his early retirement in 2007. He conducted doctoral research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and received his Ph.D. in Physics from Vanderbilt University in 1978. He received his B.S. degree in Physics from Brigham Young University in 1973, where he held a David O. McKay Presidential Scholarship. His research interests include studies in archaeometry, fusion, and solar energy. For those unfamiliar with this field, “archaeometry” is merely the actual term for “Archaeological science,” which is the application of scientific techniques to the analysis of archaeological materials to assist in dating the materials, relating to methodologies of archaeology. In any event, Dr. Jones has published papers in Nature, Scientific American, and Physical Review Letters. He taught an advanced class on Archaeometry (Physics 513R) and published “Archaeometry Applied to Olmec Iron-ore Beads” (BYU Studies 37, No.4, October 1998), pp.128-142).
    While this blog is not trying to vindicate or promote Dr. Jones’ work, we certainly feel his credentials deserve to be considered and understood in light of the questions about his horse research and claims in the Americas. We are certainly not suggesting there is any conspiracy afoot as many do, we are merely stating that mainstream science has to be reevaluated and changed from time to time as new evidences, new knowledge, and new findings become available and are accepted by mainstream scientists. It should be noted that thoseon the cutting edge and at the forefront of such advanced knowledge are often shunned by mainstream thinking until such thinking is accepted ny those in the mainstream. Dr. Jones may well be ahead of this mainstream curve.
(See the next post, “Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part VII,” for more information about horses in the Americas and specifically in South America)

Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part V

Continued from the previous post regarding the horse and its so-called extinction in the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish and the fact that horse remains are not easily located in many areas where large number of horses are known to have existed; however, some remains have been found in the Americas, and the last post indicated some of those in North America and we follow here with Mesoamerica and South America.

There is a strong claim by native American Indians that they possessed the horse long before the white man arrived in their land

First, there is one last comment to be made about pre-Spanish horses in North America. According to numerous reports of early European settlers of the 16^th century, the Indians had horses at a time before the Spanish horse could have made its way into North America along the eastern seaboard. These were quite unlike the heavy Spanish war horses that were imported by the conquistadors to carry their armored cavalry. It was not until the mid- to late-1600s that the Spanish imported light, ranching horses into New Spain (Mexico). It is important in this to know that the Spanish administrators realized that Natives could pose a threat of rebellion if they ever acquired horses. Thus, regulations in every hacienda and city forbade the sale of horses to the Indians.
    Nevertheless, Spanish caballeros required the assistance of Indian laborers whom they trained in the skills of vaqueros (or “cowboys”). Invariably, a few horses escaped; or they were stolen by enterprising Indians. However, not until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 did mass amounts of horses become available to the Indians, when those living in New Mexico under the policy of reducciones de indios, rebelled as a result of the Acoma Massacre conducted the previous year by the Spanish. Under the leadership of the Tewa Pueblo religious leader, Po’pay (Popé), the Indians overwhelmed their Spanish colonial overlords resulting in the release of hundreds of horses into the hands of Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo Indians. From this point onward, all of these marginal desert tribes maintained large herds of horses. Most of these mounts were light ranching horses of the Spanish-Arabian breed.
    According to most historians, geographers, and anthropologists, the American Indians knew nothing about horses until the 17^th century. However, this was inaccurate with political, religious, and economic motives behind the emergence of theories that the New World was “isolated” from the Old World and that Indians didn’t have any horses until after Columbus. In fact, earlier reports of Indian horses were dismissed by academic leaders as being groundless “fables.” Claims by elders of the Sioux, Nez Perce, Chippewa, and Pawnee Tribes that their ancestors “always had horses” were cast aside by the academic authorities as being “wishful thinking.”

When the British began firing on Americans in 1812, it was a turning point of feeling among those who had not already taken sides

Several powerful movements combined to crush and stifle claims that ancestors of the Plains Indians had horses and “horse culture” for thousands of years. The first force to emerge came with the War of 1812, when citizens of the young American Republic began to resent their British Heritage. After “Redcoats” burned the White House (in retaliation for raids by John Paul Jones along the English Seacoast), Americans turned away from their British roots. At this opportune moment, Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1828 published his exciting book, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
    As more than one historian has written, this popular novel captured the imaginations of disenchanted former British colonists; and it dovetailed nicely with a campaign by Pope Pius 9^th to have Columbus sainted. Meanwhile, following the massive industrial buildup in the Northern States to win the Civil War, the Senate and the U.S. Congress became more actively involved in moving the country toward western progress, which meant further isolation and subjugation of the American Indian. While the “Founding Fathers” had promoted isolation, neutrality, and non-interference in foreign affairs, the growing attitude across America was moving toward an opposite strategy. Railroad barons, with the support of the Senate in Washington, moved to get Indian treaties abolished, seeking to open up the Western Frontier to “Civilization,” which meant the Indians and their “Reservations” had to go.
    By sponsoring the “Chicago World’s Fair,” known as the Columbian Exposition, in 1893 that brought together 46 countries, with its huge centerpiece, a large water pool representing the long voyage Columbus took to the New World, focused the 27-million attendees toward Columbus and expansion.
    In this, Columbus embodied the qualities and vision of an empire-builder. Indeed, it was due to the Columbus voyages that Spain gained sovereignty over profitable colonies from Florida to Argentina. Indeed, Columbus was an excellent hero for promoting the goals of economic expansion into the Western Indian Frontier and to overseas colonies.

It is reported that horses were seen from ships passing the east coast during the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries

 

Thus, the many histories of the American Indian that had been well known and documented, were deliberately isolated and then almost entirely eradicated. Yet, the records of early colonists that had reported so frequently that everywhere the early explorers traveled along the Eastern Seaboard of North America during the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries, they reported seeing Indians (or Welsh settlers) riding horses. When John Cabot landed along the East Coast in 1497, he reported seeing “the dung of draft animals” (such as horses and cattle), though the natives wisely kept their livestock “out of sight” due to reasonable fears that alien visitors who landed along their shores might take cattle for a festive evening meal. When Jacques Cartier explored the region of Quebec in 1535, his Native host informed him that there was a tribe in the Far West where the Indians rode on horses.
    On the other hand, none of the Coastal Tribes in the Northeast that were known to French, English, and Dutch explorers in the 16^th century raised horses or cattle. However, when Colonial Pioneers crossed the Appalachian Mountains on their way into Kentucky and Tennessee in the 17^th century, they encountered Shawnee (Shaawanwaki, Ša˙wano˙ki and Shaawanowi lenaweeki), Cherokee (Aniyvwiya, Tsalagi), and Chickasaw Tribes that had an exceptional breed of horses called “Chickasaws” (Plaquemine, Chikashsha), which had a smooth-walking gait, which made them attractive for trade and theft. Similar smooth-gaited horses in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida were called “Seminole ponies” or “prairie ponies.” One Colonial trader noted that the Eastern Forest Horse was “different” from European breeds. They were so-common along the Frontier that settlers said they were “pests,” because they wandered into farmyards and munched on garden vegetables.
Mesoamerica:
    In addition to his finds in North America, Daniel C. Peterson, who discussed horse remains in North America, also states: “There are some caves in Mexico that have Mayan artifacts in association with horse bones, notably dated to the pre-Columbian period but long after the so-called extinction of horses in the Americas.” According to Peterson, such finds have almost always been discarded because the archaeologists have assumed on the basis of ideology or pre-conceived opinion that it must be site contamination because, as they claim, “Those horse bones can’t belong there,” yet they’ve been found at the right levels that suggests they do belong there.
    In fact, an article in the Academy of Natural Science states that such discoveries are typically "either dismissed or ignored by the European scientific community."

Grutas de Loltun, the grottoes or caves at Lol-Tun, located in the hilly Puuc region, and 4 miles south of Oxkutzcab, Yucatan; known as El Túnel and El Toro

In addition, John Tvedtnes, senior resident scholar with the Neal A. Maxwell Institute at BYU, there are the Loltún Caves in west central Yucatan in Mexico that have Mayan artifacts in association with horse bones.
    The fact is, there appears to be archaeological support that horses existed in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. In 1957, for instance, at Mayapan (a site corresponding to Book of Mormon lands/times) horse remains were discovered at a depth considered to be pre-Columbian. Likewise, in southwest Yucatan, a non-Mormon archaeologist found what may likely be pre-Columbian horse remains in three caves. Excavations in a cave in the Mayan lowlands in 1978 also turned up horse remains (E. Ray Clay, “Pre-Columbian Horses from Yucatan,” Journal of Mammalogy Vol.38, No.2, Oxford University Press, UK, 1957, p278).
    Dr. Peter Schmidt of the National Institute of Archaeological History, who spent four decades of his life to the study of the Maya, and was responsible for the Archaeological Project of Chichen Itzá in Yuctán, laments, regarding the Loltún cache, that 44 horse bone fragments have been recovered from levels VII to II, all supposedly from earlier time periods and also containing Maya Classic and Preclassic ceramics! His article exclaims that something has happened in Loltún that is still hard to explain: The survival of extinct animals like the Mexican Horse may need to be extended to the beginnings of the ceramic era, which would not please paleontologists
    So what about South America?
(See the next post, “Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part VI,” for more information about horses in the Americas and specifically in South America)

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)

Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part III

Continued from the previous post regarding the horse and its so-called extinction in the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish.
     It should be kept in mind that the Book of Mormon never states or implies that horses roamed the New World in large numbers—in fact, horses are mentioned infrequently in the scriptural record. If small pockets of horses lived in pre-Columbian America, it is certainly possible that they would leave little if any trace in the archaeological record.

Viking Travels during the 9^th to the 11^th centuries

For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America's east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors. It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures, but recently Canadian archaeologist Patricia Sutherland, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and a Professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, who has specialized in evidence of a long-time Norse presence on Baffin Island, announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas.
    Though all the detail about Norse trips to Vinland (as the Norse called North America) comes from two accounts: The Saga of Erik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders, the latter outlining the voyage of Bjarni Herjólfsson, who was blown off course, and skirted the coast of eastern Canada before returning to Greenland, which knowledge later promoted Leif Erickson voyage of discovery. According to Thor Hjaltalin, an Icelandic scholar who oversees archaeological activities in northwest Iceland, these epic Viking tales were probably first written down around 1200 or 1300 by scribes who either recorded the oral stories of elders or worked from some now-lost written source. What we learn from these sagas, at least in part, was that the Norsemen, from Leif Erickson to Thorfinn Karlsefni probably introduced horses, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs into the Eastern North America in the eleventh century A.D., yet these animals didn’t spread throughout the continent and they left no archeological remains, other than a claim that “archaeologists have found arrowheads with the remains of buried Norse explorers around Baffin Island and Newfoundland.
    According to one non-LDS authority on ancient American, 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. Even in areas of the world where animals lived in abundance, we sometimes have problems finding archaeological remains. As abundant as the lion must have been in ancient Israel, their remains wer evidently not found until 1988 as reported by Robert R. Bennet of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute: “The biblical narrative mentions lions, yet it was not until very recently that the only other evidence for lions in Palestine was pictographic or literary. Before the announcement in a 1988 publication [L. Martin. "The Faunal Remains from Tell es Saidiyeh," Levant 20, 1988, pp83-84) of two bone samples, there was no archaeological evidence to confirm the existence of lions in that region” (Robert R. Bennett, “Horses in the Book of Mormon,” Maxwell Institute, 2000).
    As for other difficult to find evidences, it should be noted that Abraham had camels while in Egypt, yet archaeologists, who used to believe that this was an anachronism because camels were supposedly unknown in Egypt until Greek and Roman times, have now learned that camels were used in Egypt from pre-historic times until the present day, though there remains were not there found.

The nomadic Huns had thousands upon thousands of horses, and likely came from along the border of Mongolia and Kazakhstan and were known to China as the Xiongnu who harassed their norther borders 

Also, in the 4^th and 5^th centuries AD, the Turco-Mongol nomads, also known as the Turkic and later the Huns, who originated form the steppes of central Asia and migrated westward through Asia and Eastern Europe, were characterized by mobility and ferocity. They had so many horses that estimates suggest that each warrior may have had up to ten horses. Horses were the basis of their wealth and military power, and being expert horsemen, they seemed to appear as one with their steeds. In fact, the Huns and their horses were bred for mounted warfare, with the warriors wearing soft leather boots that were excellent for riding but fairly useless for foot travel (Joshua J. Mark, “Huns,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, London, UK, 25 April 2018).
    As history has written of them, these Hunnic warriors were rarely seen dismounted and even carried on negotiations from the backs of their horses, being far more comfortable in the saddle than on the ground. They were known to appear out of nowhere on their horses, attack like a whirlwind, and vanish away leaving a swath of death behind them (Nic Fields, The Hun: Scourge of God, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2006).
    As the writer Claudian wrote of the mounted Hun: “Their double nature fitted not better the twi-formed Centaurs to the horses that were parts of them.” In fact, they were more than just a people on horseback: they were Centaurs (Claudius Claudianus, In Rufinum, Bk.1 (III), Loeb Classical Library, Geneva, 1922, p73).

The origin of the Huns or the Hunnic people, who came from along the Kazakhstan-Mongolia border in the Atlai mountains, swept westward out from their homeland and spread through western Asia and into Europe

The Hunnic forces were feared by all who encountered them, partly because of their ferocity in battle, and partly because of their incredible mobility on horseback, and upon their ability to fight strictly mounted, becoming perhaps the most expert mounted bowmen in history. Even the Roman legions eventually came to fear them, causing the Romans to pay off the Huns in order to secure peace with them (Michael Lee Lanning, The 100 Greatest Military Leaders of All Time, Robinson Publishing, London, 1997)

The Huns would appear out of nowhere, attack unsuspecting villages and people, then disappear as quickly as they arrived, leaving a horrific destruction behind them

Yet, despite this overwhelming and total dependency upon the horse and the overwhelming existence of herds of horses in the Hunnic region—the Great Hungarian Plain, which was their home base—according to a non-LDS leading authority on the zoological record for central Asia, we know very little of the Huns’ horses, and for nearly two centuries of looking, not a single usable horse bone was ever found in the territory of the whole empire of the Huns until 2006-2011, when a team of scientists and researchers from the Institute of History of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences found a burial site of 29 separate tombs containing 31 Huns along the foot of the Salkhit of Rashaant Soum in Khuvsgul Province, dating to the 2^nd century BC, according to a report in the Unuudur Newspaper by expert researcher S. Ulziibayar. In these burials, most of the Hun bodies had been buried with their horses.
    However, the claim of finding the Hun, Attila’s tomb in Hungary, as reported in March of 2014, while building a foundation of a new bridge over the Danube River in Budapest, Hungary, with human remains, many horse skeletons, a large sword made of meteoric iron, pottery, jewelry, and other weapons and grave goods traditionally associated with the Huns, has been shown to be a complete hoax. Despite the article’s claim that an Albrecht Rümschtein from the Lorand Eötvös University in Budapest described the find as “absolutely incredible,” it was found that no such person existed in connection with the University, or in Budapest, or with any excavation or finding, nor was there any such find ever reported as having occurred.
   The point is, that despite an exceptionally in-depth description of the Hun horse by Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, Rudi Lindner, a professor of History at the University of Michigan claims that “no steppe horse bones have been found in Western Europe from the proper time period, nor anything that can be exactly matched to Vegetius’ description (Rudi Paul Lindner, “Nomadism, Horses, and Huns,” Past and Present Journal, No.92, Oxford University Press, August 1981, p13).

Thus, it should be noted that even in a region where a large number of mounted warriors thrived, until just recently after many decades of serious searching, bones of horses eluded all attempts to find them. And since the burial of Atilla the Hun has never been found, and its reputed tomb having extravagant wealth buried within it, there has been a sizable amount of people and effort extended to find it throughout the Hunnic region. As it turned out, the excavation at the foot of Salkhit which lies four km away from the Rashaant Soum in the Khuvsgul Province, is in north central Mongolia, just south of the Russian border, in an extremely remote area where little work had previously been conducted.
    Thus, it should not be surprising that such evidence of Nephite horses, which very likely were in fairly small numbers since they are almost solely mentioned in the scriptural record as having been used in connection with chariots, have not yet been uncovered.
    Based on the fact that other–once thriving–animals have disappeared (often with very little trace), it is not unreasonable to suggest that the same thing might have happened with the Nephite “horse.”
   The fact is, however, that there does appear to be archaeological support that horses existed in the pre-Columbian Americas.
(See the next post, “Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part III,” 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)

Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part II

Continued from the previous post regarding the cause of the so-called large mammal extinction in North America around the close of the last Ice Age, including the horse and its claimed disappearance in America.
    When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859 he faced a substantial problem. His evolutionary mechanism predicted that the fossil record would contain finely-graded transitions revealing what George G. Simpson would later term the “tempo of mode” of evolution, which integrated the facts of paleontology with those of genetics and natural selection. However, such transitional creatures that Darwin claimed would be found have proven elusive.

Left: The fossil record; Right: Fossils imbedded in ancient rock

 

This was a major problem for paleontologists who believed that studies of European geology represented an almost complete picture of Deep Time that had already been examined carefully. If the fossil evidence for Darwin’s theory had not yet been found then there was little chance it would be in the future.
    Darwin, of course, did not agree. Following the lead of his friend and mentor Charles Lyell, Darwin argued that the fossil record was not as complete or well-studied as was supposed. The discovery of the skeleton of the dinosaur-like bird Archaeopteryx in 1861 alone showed that the fossil record held many secrets left to be revealed. Other less spectacular “intermediate” fossils came to light or were reinterpreted in an evolutionary light, and in 1870 Thomas Henry Huxley was able to propose at least three evolutionary transitions among vertebrates supported by fossil evidence.
    Huxley knew well enough that two of the transitions, from terrestrial carnivores to whales and reptiles to birds, could not be represented in a real ancestor-descendant series. Instead Huxley said that the fossils in these transitions represented the form we might expect ‘straight line’ ancestors and descendants to take. The small dinosaur Compsognathus, for instance, was not a bird ancestor but a dinosaur representative of the kind of animal from which birds evolved (emphasis added).
    Horses were another matter. The work of paleontologists like Albert Gaudry and Vladimir Kowalevsky had illustrated the linear descent of modern horses (Equus) from multi-toed ancestors like Anchitherium and Hipparion. In fact, Paleotherium seemed like a good candidate for the evolutionary starting point for horses, which was believed a perfect graded evolutionary chain that appeared to confirm Europe as the birthplace of horses.

Collection of fossils of horses the station agent gave O.C. Marsh at the 1868 well diggings a primitive rail station called Antelope, in northwest Nebraska, about 65 miles east of Cheyenne and 155 miles north of Denver, which led to four Yale expeditions to gather more specimens. In 1870, 1871, 1872, and 1873, Marsh traveled with students into the fields of the West to collect fossils. One of his finds was the first American pterosaur fossil in 1871

However, this was hotly debated and not widely accepted, resulting in it eventually being scuttled when a collection of numerous fossil horses from the American west was discovered most notably by paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh. This resulted in the now accepted understanding that horses evolved in North America, not Europe, and the horses that formed the backbone of the lineages outlined by Gaudry, Kowalevsky, and Huxley represented “invasions” of types that had evolved in North America first.
    The question that today’s scientists still grapple with on this issue, is why did horses become extinct in ancient America? After all, if hardy wild horses were present during the Pleistocene period and thrived once they were re-introduced by the Spaniards, and are so successfully living in the wild, why were they missing when the Spaniards arrived? Darwin asked the same question and today’s scientists still grapple with this question. Our question today is, were they actually missing when the Spanish arrived?
    At least a few non-Mormon scholars believe that real horses (of a stature smaller than modern horses) may have survived New World extinction. The late British American anthropologist, Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu, previously known as Israel Ehrenberg, a non-LDS scholar who Studied at Harvard, University of London and the unit4sitie of Florence, taught at a number of schools including Rutgers, University of New Jersey where he chaired the department of anthropology, suggested that the horse never became extinct in America.

In fact, despite believing in evolution, Montagu was totally opposed to orthogenesis, such as the chart of the horses evolution. As he stated: “According to Montague, the size of post-Columbian horses provides evidence that the European horses bred with early American horses.” And regarding Marsh and Cope’s horse family tree from the Eocene to the present time, said that scientists had an “equine tendency to jump to conclusions without properly considering the obstacles,” and said wryly that it was “getting the chart before the horse” (M.F. Ashley Montagu, “Time, Morphology, and Neoteny in the Evolution of Man,” American Anthropologist, Vol.57, No.1, Pt.1, February 1955, p14).
    Also non-LDS Canadian researcher, Yuri Kuchinsky, also believes that there were pre-Columbian horses. Kuchinsky, however, believes that horses (smaller than our modern horses) were reintroduced into the west coast of the Americas about 2000 years ago from Asians who came by ship. Among Kuchinsky’s evidences for pre-Columbian horses are (1) horse traditions among the Indians that may pre-date the arrival of the Spaniards, (2) supposedly pre-Columbian petroglyphs that appear to depict horses, and (3) noticeable differences between the typical Spanish horse and the much smaller Indian ponies (Yuri Kuchinsky, “Did Native Americans Really Have the Horse Before Columbus?” Science Archaeology).
    Unfortunately, however, such opposing theories are typically seen as fringe among mainstream scholars, anthropologists and scientists. Due to the dearth of archaeological support, most scholars continue to believe that horses became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene period. Is it possible that real horses lived in the Americas during Book of Mormon times? After all, archaeologists have really never been involved in searching for h horse remains “because everyone knows that a few horses lost by Coronado's expedition produced all the horses used by all the tribes which used horses.”
    Does that really sound plausible? And if horse are that hardy in the wild, and produce that quickly, how is they went extinct in the first place? And why an extinction only in North America and not elsewhere in the world at the same time?
    In addition, a little history knowledge might be helpful. First of all, the mainstream dogma about the horse and the Indians is that the Pueblo Indians are claimed to have stolen some Spanish horses in the 1600s and sold then to their neighbors the Apaches.

Spanish conquistadors traveling to the fabled city of Quivira in 1540

However, what is known is that the Spanish first contacted the Indians in 1540, when Hernando de Alvarado and Francisco Vazquez de Coronado and their men encountered a band of Querechos on their journey to Quivira—a legendary Indian province first mentioned by a Pawnee captive named El Turco that supposedly lay to the east of New Mexico pueblos somewhere on the buffalo Plains. The interest in the Spanish was that the region was said to contain a large population with much gold and silver. However, when the Spaniards reached the supposed site of Quivira in 1541, they found only villages of grass huts and a partly agricultural, partly bison-hunting economy. It was then learned that El Turco had told his stories to lure the conquistadors away from the pueblos.
    Like most legends, this one grew out of a well known and totally unsuccessful expedition, yet Francisco Leyva de Bonilla and Antonio Gutiérrez de Humaña in 1595 and that Juan de Oñate in 1601 also visited Quivira, with the same disappointing results. In fact, Fray Juan de Padilla, who had accompanied the Coronado expedition, was martyred there after attempting to establish mission work among the Indians of Quivira. Such is the lure of gold, that the actual location of Quivira has been a source of controversy and speculation among historians, ethnologists, and archeologists alike ever since, with numerous historians and “experts” place the site either in Texas or Oklahoma, further than the Panhandle of Texas, the further east the Spaniards went. Others place the location in the Great Bend area of Wichita Kansas (David Donoghue, "The Location of Quivira," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review, Vol.13,1940; Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (2 vols.), GPO, Washington, 1907, 1910).
    The point is, that between 1656 and 1675, the Spanish settlers and the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico were friendly to one another and had the common enemy of the Apache Indians, who constantly conducted raids on both peoples. This finally led the Pueblo to drive the Spanish out of New Mexico in 1680 in what was called the “Pueblo Revolt.”
    The point is, with the Spanish and Pueblo Indians on friendly terms at this time, with the common enemy being the Apache, why on earth would the Pueblo, after stealing horses from the Spanish, sell them to their enemy, the Apache?

Wild herds roamed the hills and plains of the Americas

And how long would it take a small hand of horses to produce the kind of horse numbers to provide not only riding animals to the Apaches, but to be traded for wives, for guns, and for personal wealth to take place?
    This highly supported idea hardly sounds likely under these circumstances.
(See the next post, “Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part III,” 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)

Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part I

As everyone who has ever confronted a critic of the Book of Mormon knows, the absence of certain animals when the Spanish conquistadors from Europe first arrived has been a bone of contention since the scriptural record was first published in 1830. When it comes to the horse, which was specifically mentioned as having existed among the Nephites 2500 years ago, there has been much made by these critics of its lack of existence in the Americas when these first Europeans reached the Americas.

The so-called Equus Scotti (Scott’s Horse) is claimed to have been native to North America during the Pleistocene  and became extinct during the last Ice Age

Now, every paleozoologist will tell you that the horse was prevalent in the Americas prior to the last Ice Age, which occurred around 13,000 years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago. At that time, the end of the Pleistocene, they agree that the woolly mammoth, American camels, dire wolves, short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, stag-moose, woolly rhinos and giant ground sloths all became extinct. It is interesting that these scientists claim the survival of the horse was due to the so-called Land Bridge between Alaska and Siberia, that is claimed to have been the size of Texas, in which the horse traveled east to west across it; yet, at the same time, they also claim humans crossed from west to east into North America. It is claimed this land bridge enabled near-global distribution for some species—mammals from as far away as Africa were able to spread north and east through Eurasia and into the Americas. Camels and horses instead went westward from the Americas, where their respective species had developed.
    This resulted in the horse making its way clear to Africa where these scientists claim the horse evolved into the zebra. It is interesting that the horse survived and evolved throughout Asia, the Middle East and Europe, but in North America, where it is claimed the horse first originated, it could not evolve and survive, but became extinct 7,600 years ago—it is claimed that happened because the American horse faced a changing climate, altering vegetation, and the arrival of man.
    Paleozoologists also tell us that the horse originally developed, growing through five stages, from the small, dog-sized two-foot-tall Eohippus (50 million years ago), to Mesohippus (35 MYA), to Merychiuppus (10 million years ago), to Pliohippus (5 million years ago) to the present Equus, the horse we see today. They also tell us that the The horse belongs to the order Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates), the members of which all share hoofed feet and an odd number of toes on each foot, as well as mobile upper lips and a similar tooth structure. This means that horses share a common ancestry with tapirs and rhinoceroses.

Horses, elephants and tapirs are part of a biological group known as perissodactyls or odd-toed ungulates and it is claimed they all have a common ancestor tens of millions of years ago

However, what they do not often tell us is how that classification and evolution came about, which is an interesting and informative theory developed in the late 1800s. First of all, in 1841, the earliest so-called “horse” fossil was discovered in clay around London, by a scientist named Richard Owen. He found a complete skull that looked like a fox’s head with multiple back-teeth as in hoofed animals, and called it Hyracotherium, a small forest animal with four toes on the front feet and three on the back. He saw no connection between it and the modern-day horse.
    In 1874, another scientist, the Russian paleontologist Vladimir Onufrievich Kovalevsky, attempted to establish a link between this small fox-like creature, which he thought was 70 million years old, and the modern horse. He was one of the first adopters of Charles Darwin in Russia, and translated Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, as well as The Descent of Man, and was most notable for his early work on the evolution of the Hippomorpha family (today’s horses and their extinct members, the “Equoidea’), having written On the Osteology of the Hyopotamidae.
    In 1879, an American fossil expert, Othniel Charles Marsh, and famous evolutionist Thomas Huxley, collaborated for a public lecture which Huxley gave in New York.

(Image C – The so-called evolution of the horse (from Eohippus to Equus)

Marsh produced a schematic diagram which attempted to show the so-called development of the front and back feet, the legs, and the teeth of the various stages of the horse. He published his evolutionary diagram in the American Journal of Science in 1879, and it found its way into many other publications and textbooks.
    His diagram and scheme has not changed over the past more than 125 years. It shows a an arguable gradational sequence in “the evolution” of the horse, unbroken by any abrupt changes, which is what we see in school textbooks.
    As an interesting side note on this and how scientists sometimes arrive at their conclusions, is found in the discovery made by anthropology professor Douglas Bamforth of the University of Colorado regarding a cache comprising 83 stone implements found within the city limits of Bounder City, Colorado in 2008. Upon finding animal residue on the ancient implements, they were sent to anthropology professor Robert Yohe of the Laboratory of Archaeological Science at California State, Bakersfield, for the protein residue tests. Upon finding the residue was from ancient camels and horses, he promptly claimed the stone implements were of Clovis Culture design. Why? Because, as he said, “We haven’t had camels or horses around here since the late Pleistocene.” This lead Bamsford to surmise that the type of people who buried the cache “lived in small groups and forged relationships over large areas.” He also added about these unknown people, “I’m skeptical that they wandered widely, and they may have been bound together by a larger human network.”
    According to Andrew Solow, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, “It was impossible to rule out human hunting as a cause or major contributing factor to North American horse extinction.” In fact, in 2009, DNA analysis evidence suggests that the horse may have survived in North America until 7,600 years ago—some 5000 years longer than previously thought. Meaning the horse in North America did not become extinct around the close of the last Ice Age, since the new timeline suggests an overlap with human habitation approaching 6000 years.

Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC

“We don’t know how long it takes to pinch out a species,” stated Ross MacPhee, curator of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, adding that “Extinctions often seem dramatic and sudden in fossil records, but our study provides an idea of what an extinction event might look like in real time, with imperiled species surviving in smaller and smaller numbers until eventually disappearing completely.”
    Of course none of the scientists involved consider the fact that the horse might have survived in such remote areas period! And that extinction never occurred at all. As a matter of fact, core samples collected by McPhee and his colleagues, provided a clear picture of the local Alaskan fauna at the end of the last ice age. The oldest sediments, dated to about 11,000 years ago (9000 BC), contained remnant DNA of Arctic hare, bison, and moose; all three animals were also found in higher, more recent layers, as would be expected. In addition, one core, deposited between 7600 and 10,500 years ago, confirmed the presence of both mammoth and horse DNA. To make certain there was no contamination, the team did extensive surface sampling around Stevens Village. No DNA evidence of mammoth, horse, or other extinct species was found in modern samples, a result that supports previous studies which have shown that DNA degrades rapidly when exposed to sunlight and various chemical reactions.
    So what else might have been degraded beyond obvious appearance? After all, North America is a large area—9.54 million square miles—and even today, so much of the land scattered in the East and a great deal of land in the West, as well as in the North, and south through Mexico, is vacant, with numerous remote and out-of-the-way areas, seldom visited by man, let alone scientists digging for artifacts and knowledge of the past.
    Of course, it is claimed that “evidence” of climate change and the resulting change of vegetation is considered the most likely cause for horse extinction, but other investigations may have pinned down the cause even more specifically. Johns Hopkins paleobiologist Steven Stanley, a Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences professor, found evidence that it was the grittier nature of grass that may have caused the demise of equine species. He claims that as the Earth’s climate became cooler and dryer, the trend toward expanding grasslands and receding forests continued in North America, and that species of horses in North America were split between those with long teeth and those with shorter teeth. And because grasses have a gritty compound called silica, which is contained in sand and is used to make glass, when animals chewed it, the silica wore down their teeth. Thus, animals with longer teeth lived longer because their teeth did not wear as fast, allowing them to feed and survive longer.

As grasslands expanded, the horses with long teeth lived longer because they were best adapted to eating grasses instead of leaves. Living longer enabled them to produce enough offspring to guarantee survival of their species and the evolution of new species. At some point, only the horses especially adapted to eating grasses—those with longer teeth—were surviving in North America. However, Stanley claims extinction occurred because “something about the grasses must have changed, making it impossible for the horse to survive.”
    Of course it might be pointed out that scientists also claim that some 70% of North American large mammals became extinct between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. What was it that brought that about?
    According to Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, wrote in the journal Nature: “The causes of this extinction—the role of humans versus that of climate—have been the focus of much controversy. 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.
    It is interesting how scientists hold to that unprovable claim, however Guthrie himself claims “The timing of these equid regional extinctions and accompanying evolutionary changes are poorly known.” Of course every scientist has their own opinion. Guthrie believes that it was climate change and a shift from grasslands to tundra as the likely cause, resulting in a reduction in the animals’ food supply and their eventual extinction, claiming the evidence does not support human overkill or several other extinction causes.
(See the next post, “Where Are the Land of Promise Horses? – Part II,” 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)