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Re: history questions: meat, siberian land bridge, horses in the Americas
W Letendre (wjl@zipnet.net)
Sat, 21 Dec 1996 05:46:14 -0500
jimamy@primenet.com wrote:
>
> nipponwb@nash.mindspring.com (Nippon-Nashville Web Site) wrote:
>
> >What counter-theories are there to the land bridge and Spanish
> >introduction of horses? I was not aware of any. If Leaky(sp?) et al.
> >are right about modern man emerging from his simian(sp?) ancestors in
> >Africa, the "native Americans" had to come from some other continent
> >somehow. I believe there are indications that prehistoric horses
> >(little bitty ones) existed in the Americas but died out. What's
> >going down, theory-wise?
> >
> >JCR
>
> It is my understanding that full size horses lived in North America prior
> to reintroduction by the Spanish. When I say full size, I mean just as
> big or bigger than a normal modern horse that has not been selectively
> bred for large size by man. These horses did die out before the Spanish
> arrived and reintroduced the horse. I have never heard of any evidence
> that man in North America ever hunted these original horses and I am have
> not seen any evidence that man was responsable for their extinction. Is
> there any such evidence that man ever hunted these horses? When did they
> go extinct?
Horse, mammoth, camel, a few species of sloth, all became extinct in America about
11 KYBP, at roughly the same time as Clovis spear points began appearing in
America. This has been interpreted as evidence that the arrival of man in New World
led to these species becoming extinct through human predation, just as ancient
Polynesians killed off the Moa, but this remains an area of considerable
controversy.
W Letendre
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