When the Mesoamerican Indians first saw a Spanish soldier on his horse, they did not know how to process it or understand what they were seeing. Although mounts are few, the historical chronicles speak of an initial mission with a few dozen horses and a few mares, mentioning comments from primitive peoples of how the mounted troops of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1519 looked like centaurs, both man and horse would have merged. Thus it was registered that they understood that the horse and its rider were one. One unity.
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Now, a multidisciplinary survey involving nearly a hundred scientists from around the world and 66 centers and institutions shows how the human-horse symbiosis relationship among Indo-American tribes in the plains of the United States has been a constant in the first half of the year was in the 17th century before the rest of the European colonizers arrived.
At least since the Spanish conquest of America in the south during the Viceroyalty of New Spain, horses had already spread north from the frontier settlements in New Mexico. This new dating of the fossil record advances the previously documented presence of domesticated horses by 200 years and notes a “strong genetic affinity” between contemporary horse herds and the Spanish equestrian population of centuries ago.
Horse and Rider Petroglyph in Tolar, Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Depiction carved by Comanche or Shoshone.PAT OAK
The modern wild horse had roamed the Americas thousands of years earlier during the Pleistocene, so the authors of the work, published today in the journal Science, find it indisputable that there was constant contact between the two animals. One of the unknowns that the new evidence solves is that after horse records disappeared 13,000 years ago during the Ice Age, the equids found in North American West are undoubtedly Iberians coming from Eurasia across the Atlantic and landing in the Caribbean with the troops of the Spanish Empire at the beginning of the 17th century.
This research stems from a pioneering and seemingly unnatural collaboration between institutionalized science and the knowledge of the tribes of the Great Plains of the United States, with scientists from Comanche, Pawnee and Lakota, among other indigenous peoples. Researcher Yvette Collins from the Toulouse Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics (CAGT) in France is also known as the “running horse” (tašunke iyanke wiŋ) of the Lakota tribe on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota (USA). The scientist explains that it was “the time to join other indigenous communities and embrace scientific research”. A novel investigation, Collins details, to analyze the past of horses, a species that plays a key role in Native American cosmogony and culture. The Lakota group itself, the Sioux, call themselves sunwakaŋ: horse nation.
It was time to join other indigenous communities and embrace scientific research to analyze the origin of horses, a key species of our culture.
Yvette Collins, Toulouse Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics
Researcher Yvette Collins from the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics in Toulouse, France, with Raven.CANCELLED
“From a Lakota perspective, horses are in the same category as humans, even more so; our experience with them is different,” says Collins. For this reason, as a member of the tribe and from her experience as a researcher in Paris, she develops: “We do not use fences or corrals with the horses, we present the animals as part of the clan and they are sacred.” Their interest in science and the history of Equus family mammals motivated this interdisciplinary study, as did the fact that their society was one of the first indigenous reserves to open the door to outside researchers.
“It’s historic,” exulted French geneticist Ludovic Orlando, also of the CAGT and co-author of the paper. The expert has been studying equine evolution for more than 15 years: “Of course, what we found out about the reappearance of these animals in the United States is important, but that native peoples work together with geneticists is unique.” The director of the laboratory for Molecular Archeology believes that regardless of the ideas the publication uncovers, what is crucial is that “it is the first time that Native American societies have themselves conducted the analyses”.
The fact that indigenous peoples work together with geneticists is historically unique: it is the first time that the Indians have carried out the analyzes themselves
Ludovic Orlando, Geneticist and CAGT Director
Among the study’s findings, the analysis made use of the archaeological remains of the first historical specimens of horses, rather than relying on the “records with omissions, inaccuracies and a strong anti-indigenous bias” of the European conquerors, the authors detail, as many had made earlier studies” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The horse is essential for many indigenous cultures of the North American Southwest to be able to move through the Great Plains, an area of 2.8 million km² that traverses the entire Midwest of the continent from north to south, connecting Mexico to the United States and Canada. . Archaeologist William Taylor of the University of Colorado at Montana and co-author of this study, who found a horseman fossil with torsion marks on the snout, indicates that the mount was ridden by Native Americans and, moreover, that it was healed , as the relic has healed wounds in its bone record.
Taylor is a researcher specializing in Mongolia: “The Asian record of the relationship with horses is vastly different from what we find in the indigenous west.” By analyzing the 30 bone remains using osteological, genomic, isotopic, radiocarbon and paleopathological tests, the scientist describes, among other things, that the signs found in the skull indicate expert coordination between rider and horse.
One of the specimens analyzed in the scholarly work on the relationship between Native Americans and their horses.William Taylor (University of Colorado, Montana, USA)
The specialist in Mesoamerican studies Federico Navarrete of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who is not associated with this work, describes how the horse had a greater relationship with the tribes north of the Rio due to its “hunter-gatherer character and nomadic nature”. Grande entered Native Americans” across the American prairies. In central Mexico, meanwhile, the historian points out, “To the native Mesoamericans, they were not as useful or an element of significant exchange.” A more important role for the Mexica was played by another animal domesticated in the Near East and transported transatlantic by Columbus in 1492: the sheep. “In our America, they liked sheep better, they gave wool quickly, they were edible and they grew everywhere, and that became very important,” lists Navarrete.
A key figure in the world of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Orlando bemoans the disappearance of horses: “A loss of animal life, but also of culture.” 70 million, as horses; This would have been unthinkable 100 years ago when there were even manure problems in Paris or New York, the possibility of a major horse manure crisis.”
For the scientist, a success in his research is how they approached the study topic: “The worst thing we could have done is helicopter science: go into these communities, do our studies and leave without relating to them.” So Collins, who emphasizes how Lakota science emphasizes conservation and equivalency with the horse, is optimistic about further work with indigenous communities: “It’s the first investigation of many.”
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