Re: Equids

Steve Sohn (sasohn@phantom.com)
5 Dec 1994 20:37:40 GMT

whittet (whittet@shore.net) wrote:
: 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

Steve -
I believe current thought has the ancestral equus hunted to
extinction during the second advance of glacier shield, could be
(probably am) wrong.

Worked my way through 2/3 of my undergrad years as a
"professional" horseman, showing hunters and jumpers, and accompanying
foxhunts. I do not believe, unless one was lashed to the horse and not
allowed off, that any skelatal evidence could be made for an equestrian
society. More likely the gravesites -- and these are found -- show the
rider buried with, sometimes even mounted upon, the faithful mount. I
believe from Siberia domestication heads southwest and the Mittani, I
think, become the leading horsemen of the early bronze (from here it is
conjectured that such things as Illium's legendary prowess with the horse
originate), introducing the chariot which supposedly predates "riding." 

--

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         Steve Sohn

 sasohn@phantom.com

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