Equids
whittet (whittet@shore.net)
4 Dec 1994 04:26:59 GMT
This is just a thought I have been chewing on a while.
Equids in general, horses in particular seem to originate in North America
and to still be around in the Americas, up to about 10,000 BC, I believe
that is correct, please correct me if I am wrong.
The evidence suggests that the species evolved in North America
managed to get themselves to Europe sometime in the last 100,000
years, possibly arriving even more recently than that, and were
widely dispersed across Europe and Asia by the time they were first
known to be domesticated by man.
The first evidence for domestication of the horse, appears to have
been located in Siberia, dated to around 7,000 BC. Again, please
correct me if I am wrong.
This domestication of the horse occurs in an area from which,
it is reasoned, early man may have migrated to the new world,
although the time and method of this migration appear to be
coming under ever more strain as the artifacts and sites of
man's occupation of the New World are pushed ever farther back in time.
I wonder if there is any Anthropological evidence of the people in the
New World being less advanced in some way than their relatives in Siberia?
If not, if they were equally resourceful and capable human beings,
and as some studies seem to suggest, they arrived considerably
more than 12,000 years ago, they might have been capable of domesticating
the horse in the New World, shortly before our evidence indicates they
did in Asia.
How would you go about asking and answering that sort of question,
as to whether or not man was associated with Equids in the New World?
Would you be able to tell from the development of the bones in the leg
whether or not a man rode a horse?
The reason I ask, is that most New World Migrations seem to go north
instead of south.
I wonder if people could have drifted to the Americas by boat,
coasting along the Aleutians say,
and then ridden back home on horseback, or perhaps even taken
horses with them on their boats.
Many Sea Peoples have been known to do that
from time to time.
If it happened that over a rather long
period of time people coasted their way
to the Americas, and then came suddenly roaring back
as hoards of cavalry, it might explain why the
migration patterns in Asia seem to be from East to west.
As I said, it is just a weird thought...
Steve
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