Re: Equids
WIlliam C. Wilson (Wildbill@ilhawaii.net)
28 Dec 1994 23:37:23 GMT
>>"WIlliam C. Wilson" <Wildbill@ilhawaii.net> says:
> >>The original 16 Spanish horses were Andalusian chargers, war horses
> >>designed to carry Conquistadores in full armor. The only other type
once again, the above is NOT my statement. Mstatement did include what
is listed emmediatly below.
> >>>(ie.. you don't need a big strong fairly fast horse to pull a plow,
> >>>chariot, wagon, etc; but you do to carry a 180 lb man, 80 lbs of
> >>>armour and 20-30 lbs of weapons at a galloping charge.
>
> The reported extinction of the horse in the Americas after sixty some odd
> million years of sucessful adaptations, followed virtually immediately
> by the reintroduction of virtually identical sucessors in the same
> enviornment seems odd.
While I grant that 11,500 years is a geologic instant, That seems to
be the period of time we are dealing with. the assuptions I'm working
from are these:
1)Siberian hunter/gatherers enter the Americas @12,000BC.
too my knowledge none of the pre-Clovis sites being
investigated are fully accepted.
2)Fossil evidence of the American horse disappears from the
fossil record at @10,000 BC along with most of the other
large fauna(Mammoth, Rhino, Pleistocene Bison etc.).
3)Proto-Amerindian tool cultures undergo a change to smaller
spear.arrow points at the same time.
This atleast suggests that the large easily hunted animals
had been eliminated.
4)There is no evidence for the domesticaation of animals (other
than the dog) until @ 6000 - 8000 BC.
5)Domestication of herd animals follows or is contemporaneous
with the beginings of crop domestication.
6)Only those animals still extant and with sufficient docility
to be handled by humans/dogs on foot were domesticated.
With these assuptions it seems likely that the american horse was
present during the human intrance to the Americas, but served as a
food source until its extermination some 2-3000 years later. (yes
I know this is an extremely short time for the extinction to occur,
but the entire human invasion of the americas seems to be extremely
rapid and large scale.) Following some 3000-4000 years of
hunter/gatherer activities several groups of native americans beganto
domesticate crops and settle down into communities. Of these only
one had any small docile herd beasts in their area, the domestication
of the llama and alpaca in S. america seems to be the result.
At the momment I am working without most of my library available
but will try to find recent sources to substantiate the assumptions
above. If you have evidence that supports or disproves any of the above
I would welcome seeing it.
While the idea of the indian having domesticated the horse is
interesting I would suggest checking with the indian ethnologists
for records of the introduction of the horse to different tribes.
I believe the records show that the Souix didn,t start moving onto
the great plains from the western shores of the Great Lakes until
they got the horse in the late 1700's or early 1800's (possibly from
French/English sources rather than Spanish). Also I understand that the
Apache were runners rather than horsemen most of the time and
that horse was one of their preffered meat sources.
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