What! Horses in North American before Hernado Cortez? Nah you gotta be kidding me!
Let's examine the 13 Book of Mormon passages which records horses living alongside Pre-Historic man, prior 1492 when Columbus sailed the
What! Horses in North American before Hernado Cortez? Nah you gotta be kidding me!
Let's examine the 13 Book of Mormon passages which records horses living alongside Pre-Historic man, prior 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
2014 Book of Mormon Horse News Update!
Cave Dig Unearths Bones of Ancient Horses, Cheetahs and Bison
June 15, 2009
Evidense for those who doubt the Book of Mormons claimes.
Hagerman "Horse" - Equus simplicidens
Many different scientific names have been applied to this horse. James W. Gidley, the Smithsonian paleontologist, who led the initial excavations at Hagerman in 1929, felt that the horse being uncovered was different enough in its skeleton that it represented a new species distinct from any other known fossil horse. He proposed the name Plesippus shoshonensis. By placing the Hagerman horse in the genus Plesippus, he considered it to be closely related to another fossil species, Plesippus simplicidens, from Texas. Although another horse, Equus idahoensis, had been described from elsewhere in this region, Dr. Gidley considered his new species to be more primitive. Since the early work of Gidley, many other studies on fossil horses have been made and the consensus is that the horse at Hagerman does belong in the modern genus Equus and that it is the same as the extinct species from Texas, simplicidens. So today most paleontologists refer to the Hagerman Horse by the scientific name of Equus simplicidens.
The Hagerman Horse also has the distinction of being the earliest record of Equus, the genus that includes all modern horses, donkeys, and zebras.
Even though the species found at Hagerman, Equus simplicidens, is known from elsewhere such as Nebraska, Florida, and Texas, all of the other records are much younger, making the sample from Hagerman the oldest.
Hillary Mayellfor National Geographic News
May 11, 2001
Scientists have found the first definitive proof that early humans in North America hunted horses for their meat.
Prehistoric horses, which were much smaller than today's horses, standing about 4.5 feet (1.5 meters) high at the shoulder, became extinct about 10,000 years ago. Scientists considered it likely that hunting by humans was a factor in their extinction, but until now there was no hard proof.
The first conclusive evidence comes from spearheads tainted with the residue of horse protein. They were found along with other animal remains on the river plain of St. Mary's Reservoir in southern Alberta, Canada.
"In the past, we could really only attribute the demise of these ancient horses to climate and environmental changes," said Brian Kooyman, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary and the lead scientist at the dig.
"There has been suggestive evidence at other sites—Lubbock Lake in Texas, for instance—that early peoples were utilizing horses," he said. "But this discovery raises the very real possibility that overhunting by the Clovis people played a significant role in the extinction."
European explorers reintroduced horses to the New World several thousand years after the ancient ones died out.
"It was a near miss," Kooyman said of the discovery. "We weren't going to bother testing them [for horse protein residue]. We'd had similar findings before and the points all came back from the lab clean. But the two graduate students kept insisting we send them in, and we're glad they did."
"Retreating ice would cause changes in temperature, vegetation bands and probably a patchiness in vegetation and loss of habitat," said Paul McNeil, a Ph.D. candidate in paleontology at the
"Environment and climate change were definitely factors in the extinction event, but there had been numerous instances of glaciers advancing and retreating during the Pleistocene, and this is the only time we see a megafaunal extinction. The arrival of humans is the only real new factor," he said.
Horses were introduced into the Americas during the 16th Century by the Spanish Conquistadors. Escapees from the Spanish stocks thrived and quickly established large wild populations. The absence of these "noble animals" before the colonization of the New World and the horse's success thereafter were seen by some Europeans as one more bit of evidence that the American fauna was inferior to that of the Old World (1).
The Old World pedigree of the horse was first challenged by the discovery of fossil teeth in South America which had been collected by a young Charles Darwin and examined by Richard Owen in 18