blueelectricangels:mapsontheweb:Map of Native American etymologies for “horse”. There were no horses
blueelectricangels:mapsontheweb:Map of Native American etymologies for “horse”. There were no horses in the Americas before the colonists arrived. Native Americans quickly developed new words for this strange animal, often associating them with dogs, their one other domestic animal before contact with Europe.So I built a lecture on perissodactyls (the order that horses belong to) earlier this year, and one neat thing that kept coming up was the fact that it’s very much disputed whether horses coexisted with indigenous Americans prior to the arrival of European colonists. Historically, Western science has said that the modern horse, E. caballus, arrived with colonization - but various indigenous peoples dispute that. Oral history from several nations places the horse in North America prior to the arrival of settlers; the fossil record says there was almost definitely some overlap of early indigenous Americans and caballoid horses. It’s entirely possible that caballoid horses persisted in small numbers under domestication right up until contact with Europe - there are many possible reasons there wouldn’t necessarily be fossil evidence for that.It’s a thorny question in part because of how it relates to modern conservation - if indigenous Americans had horses prior to colonization, it lends more weight to the argument that modern feral horses are in fact native widlife, just reintroduced. Which in turn means that feral horses should be protected under wildlife laws - not intentionally exterminated as they are in many areas. -- source link
#history#indigenous history