We were brought up on the love story between the horse and those who used to be termed American Indians. Outstanding riders, living in symbiosis with this animal, the natives of our childhood westerns had – at least in this respect – everything to teach the white man. What we didn’t know as children, was that there was a memory problem underlying this concession.
“In a nutshell, the natives had reportedly stolen the horse from the Spanish conquerors during the Pueblo revolt in 1680, and had then integrated it into their culture,” summarized Ludovic Orlando, molecular archaeologist and director of research at the CNRS [French National Centre for Scientific Research]. “That was the history written by Western explorers,” continued the horse history specialist. “But some indigenous peoples have a very different history. The Lakota, for example, say that they’ve had horses ‘since time immemorial.’ And they’re the ones who came to me to have us conduct this research.”
In 2018, the researcher revealed to the world that Przewalski’s horse – reputed to be the last wild species – actually comes from domesticated animals returned to the wild. This was the collapse of a myth. Then, at the request of the elders of the Oglala Sioux tribe, researcher Yvette Running Horse Collin came to ask him to tackle another icon, the American Western horse. “She spent three years in Toulouse and we co-created this work. It’s fueled by indigenous science, which I admit to having learned regarding, and by our own,” said Orlando.
Published in the journal Science on Friday, March 31, the study by researchers from 15 countries, including many indigenous Americans, has once once more shaken up some established ideas. The dating carried out on 29 horse fossils establishes that three of them – found in Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas – predate 1600, in other words regarding a century before the famous Puebloan revolt. So, it was not during this successful uprising once morest the Spanish conquerors that the natives discovered the horse. The legend forged by the victors goes flying out the door.
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A ‘new world’
Would the “time immemorial” cherished by the Lakota trace a history back to the now-extinct Upper Pleistocene ancient horses that populated the continent’s north 12,000 years ago? Or to the horses of the Vikings, who arrived in the east of the continent in the eleventh century? Analysis of ancient DNA has bluntly dismissed these hypotheses. All the samples examined testify to horses of Spanish origin. “Except one, which is of English origin,” corrected Orlando. “In the same way, when we analyze today’s mustangs, we observe Spanish and sometimes English variants. In fact, the entire history of colonization is found in the genome of our closest companion.”
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