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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Cool Science Open Thread: Horses As New Tech in the American West

Cool Science Open Thread: Horses As New Tech in the American West

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I remember reading the phrase: There was a horse-shaped hole in the Plains ecology. When a tech innovation drops that can really update the lifestyle of a whole society, there’s a strong incentive to become an early adopter…


If this new work holds up (a critically important caveat for all new scientific results), this long-held story, foundational to the US national narrative, will have to be rewritten—though exactly how remains to be seen. 5/15

Reader Interactions

50Comments

  1. 1.

    bbleh

    Wait, what? Barbarian Aboriginals doing something that Civilized Men do but weren’t given it by them?  I mean, whoa, hold yer horses here!  (And this definitely can’t go on any Florida bookshelves.)

  5. 5.

    Grumpy Old Railroader

    There is an interesting documentary (True Appaloosa) about a New Zealand horsewoman who sets off to find out how the Nez Pierce tribe in Idaho already had Appaloosa horses when American explorers arrived. The hypothesis is that when Russian explorers reached the Pacific, they used horses from the Central Asian steppes in their exploration of the Pacific coast of North America and somehow, this breed ended up in the hands of indigenous tribes in the 1750’s.  She tracks them back to Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia where she finds entire herds of Appaloosa horses. The American Appaloosa is genetically linked to those Central Asian  horses

  6. 6.

    James E Powell

    @SpaceUnit:

    Re-writing history, or at least responding to the challenge to defend existing narratives, is what makes history so awesome.

  7. 7.

    Dangerman

    This kinda reminds me of a cultural question that has crossed my mind. It’s related to mobility and horse prompts the remembrance.

    My Father had two childhood friends. Went to HS together. For most of my life, they lived within a circle that had a radius of about a mile. Even when one moved later in life, that radius became less than 10 miles. Maybe even less then 5 (too lazy to figure that out right now).

    I have only 1 friend I’d consider lifelong (we probably went to Kindergarten together). As for proximity, we’ve lived hundreds of miles apart.

    What changed? Can’t be cars as those predated my Father. Interstate highway system? OK, partial contribution, maybe.

    My Father and 2 friends had lifelong careers. One job. Well, each advanced within their respective organization. But that doesn’t explain how they all bought houses that close to each other (and not that far from where they grew up) to start. And stay.

    Oddly, they passed within about 25 days of each other. I got tired of going to funerals.

    Just openly pondering.

    ETA: Probably significant to add my Father’s birthday would have been Tuesday. 4/4. Easy to remember for lots of reasons.

  8. 8.

    oatler

    The local Fox station did a half hour story this morning about AZ ranchers being overwhelmed by the solar industry. Well, the ranchers already “overwhelmed” the “locals” so the next threat is…solar panels? Yeah, eco-terrorists.

  10. 10.

    Geminid

    Spanish horses made it to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts some decades before the Spanish established a colony in present New Mexico, in 1598. The Commanches might have gotten hold of some by then. And even if it was the European settlers of New Mexico who brought the horses, I expect the Commanches, Navaho, and Utes would have “liberated” some long before 1680. It wouldn’t have  been so long before they started trading the horses.

  11. 11.

    VOR

    @oatler: There is a small industrial scale solar facility not far from my house. Neighbors who live nearby were complaining about the noise generated by the solar photovoltaic panels. When someone said “really?” the neighbors clarified that they meant the truck traffic during the construction process. Uh huh.

  12. 12.

    Tony Jay

    Sooooo… horses from one of the very early Spanish expeditions got ‘liberated’ and their descendants spread up into and across the Great Plains a century or more before current historical models suggest they did?

    I’m a bit confused. Is the point Mann is making that a mid-1500s date for the arrival of horses into the middle of the continent means the great Plains horse cultures developed those cultures with zero input from Europeans? While the original dating of post-1680s for the entry of horses into the Plains societies included a stipulation that their horse cultures were influenced by contact with European settlers?

    Okay then. It’s not exactly ‘The American Horse survived the arrival of the paeleolithic We Hunt, Kill and Eat Fucking Everything culture from out of ice-age East Asia’, but it’s still interesting.

  13. 13.

    Brachiator

    @bbleh:

    Wait, what? Barbarian Aboriginals doing something that Civilized Men do but weren’t given it by them?  I mean, whoa, hold yer horses here!  (And this definitely can’t go on any Florida bookshelves.)

    I hate this kind of nonsense. Previous interpretation had nothing to do with Europeans giving indigenous people horses or training them, but on Native people independently finding a use for wild horses.

    And North America is a huge continent. If the new research holds up, there are then questions about the dispersal of horses, and why they did not appear to be more widely used by more Native people.

  14. 14.

    Geminid

    @oatler: There’s been some opposition to solar installations on Virginia agricultural land.  Five years ago, when I lived near Stuart’s Draft, I saw signs agitating against some local projects, with a “save agriculture” argument. The landowners argued that these were relatively small parcels, all they were growing was hay, and the rent for the solar projects would help keep the land in the family. I moved away, but I believe Augusta County granted the special use permits.

    But I’ve heard that in Virginia at least, farmers keep sheep around the panels to suppress bushes and trees. Maybe that’s what’s bugging those Arizona ranchers. This could be a cattleman vs. sheepman beef.

  15. 15.

    James E Powell

    @Tony Jay:

    Is the point Mann is making that a mid-1500s date for the arrival of horses into the middle of the continent means the great Plains horse cultures developed those cultures with zero input from Europeans?

    That seems to be his inference from the article about the study neither of which I have read.

    I am suspicious of zeros, but it is plausible that the horses spread faster & farther than the Euro-Humans.

  17. 17.

    Feathers

    @Geminid: There was discussion 15 years ago about the fact that the “best” (and easiest/cheapest to install) places to put solar panels was land that was currently being used as farmland. Of course no solutions to the problem have been seriously proposed in the years since.

    We have a real problem in this country because “property rights” are seen as making any sort of land use planning impossible. Same with water rights. The sooner we start realizing that America has a landed gentry problem, the better.

    *This was at a very high end green business summit where I worked as support staff.

  18. 18.

    Another Scott

    From the Science article:

    Viking colonizers brought horses as far as Greenland during the 10th to 14th centuries CE (9) and settled along areas of the Newfoundland coast during the 11th century CE (10). There is, however, no direct evidence that Viking horses reached settlements on the mainland (11). Instead, most western scholars accept that horses were first reintroduced into the Americas by Spanish settlers in the late 15th century CE, reaching the mainland in the early 16th century CE with the Spanish colonization of Mexico (12). During the 17th to 19th centuries CE, colonizing European powers, including the British, Spanish, and French (13, 14), and possibly Russian and Chinese merchants (15) imported considerable numbers of horses into western North America.

    […]

    Historical models for the post-Columbian North American dispersal of horses and their integration into Indigenous cultures are almost exclusively derived from textual sources written by European observers dating largely to the 18th and 19th centuries CE [e.g., (20, 21)]. These sources depict horses first spreading in appreciable numbers north from what is today the American Southwest after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 CE, when Spanish settlers were temporarily expelled from much of New Mexico (22). Given that most of the continent north of New Mexico was terra incognita to European chroniclers, natural and cultural landscapes remained largely uncharacterized until the early 19th century CE (23). Furthermore, these Euro-American historic records are often rife with inaccuracies and strong anti-Indigenous biases, depreciating the fundamental relationship between Indigenous peoples and horses (24).

    Folks writing history are embedded in their culture. It’s good the science is re-examining these things to give us all a clearer picture of what really happened, and how and why it happened the way it did.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  19. 19.

    Feathers

    @schrodingers_cat: Do you listen to the Tides of History podcast. He just spent around two years on the Bronze Age and is just starting on the Iron. What I enjoy is that it’s not just Europe and the Middle East, but also the Steppes, China, India, the Americas, and Polynesia. Guy is somehow a former sports broadcaster with a PhD in History (Late Roman Antiquity). It’s a mix of topic episodes and hour long interviews with academics.

  20. 20.

    Tony Jay

    @James E Powell:

    If they can solidify those 16th century dates for horses that appear to have been domesticated by people who knew what they were doing well enough that their knowledge of horse-tending was likely to have been passed down through the generations, yeah, it’s a story, but it’s not that amazing.

    I suppose the sticking point would be the question of whether the first Plains Indian to see a horse made the mental jump from “Big Food Animal” to “I can totally ride on the back of that!” independently or if they got the idea from seeing native Americans from further south on horseback, because at however many removes, that’s still a legacy of colonisation.

    Now, if they’d found proof that the Plains cultures got their horses from refugee Carthaginians fleeing the Punic Wars, that would impress me.

  21. 21.

    Geminid

    @Tony Jay: Cortez conquered the Aztecs in in the 1520s using mounted fighters. The news of these strange animals would have spread fast. One way or another, some would have come into native hands.

    Another possibility is that shipwrecked horses made it to shore and thrived. A population of wild horses would have multiplied quickly.

  23. 23.

    bbleh

    @Brachiator: Sigh. The point was not to mock previous research but ignorant ethnonationalist bigotry; thus the Florida reference.  I’ll provide an explanatory footnote next time.

  24. 24.

    bbleh

    @Tony Jay: Now, if they’d found proof that the Plains cultures got their horses from refugee Carthaginians fleeing the Punic Wars, that would impress me.

    IIRC at least one of the Lost Tribes of Israel ended up in North America — maybe it was them!

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    @bbleh

    Later on in time, one of the peoples Lewis & Clark expected to find was a rumored tribe of blue-eyed, Welsh speaking Indians.

  26. 26.

    Tony Jay

    @Geminid:

    There’s a huge difference between hearing fairytales about metal-skinned creatures with the legs of deer laying waste to distant tribes and understanding that these small herds of wild ‘big dogs’ are designed to be ridden around on. That’s a cognitive jump that seems obvious in hindsight but wouldn’t have been at the time without first hand (or at least second hand) knowledge of the concept of horse riding.

    @sab:

    That’s an important point. One of the reasons that historians have leant into the “native Americans adopted horse culture only after seeing it in action” mindset is because no Native American culture (that I know of) domesticated an animal for riding around on. Like the zebra in Africa, the llamas and alpacas of South America could have been bred over generations to fill this niche, but as far as I know they weren’t, because the concept itself simply didn’t exist.

    @bbleh:

    Those losers? They didn’t even bring hummus with them. Splitters!

  28. 28.

    M31

    pretty sure the horses came from the Garden of Eden, which my Mormon friends tell me was in Missouri

  29. 29.

    Geminid

    @Tony Jay: The story of Montezuma’s fall and the strange beasts involved might have been more like breaking news than a fairy tale. There were plenty of witnesses, and it would have been a big deal to tribes on the periphery of their empire. Those folks would have wanted some of those beasts, and could have found a way to get a couple.

  30. 30.

    scav

    Need a lot more bones as evidence to untangle these things out with techniques newly available to us.  Figuring out both location, dating and probable ancestry of the beasts is the obvious big first step.  But I read / heard recently that they can determine from cattle ankles  whether they were yoked to a plow / cart or not (plus the distribution of sexes I think) so maybe something skeletal in horses could disentangle if horses were used first for travois dragging (immediate just a big dog substitute) and then riding or riding emerged immediately.  Might also a spatial and temporal patterns in those elements too.

  31. 31.

    Anne Laurie

    @Tony Jay: One of the reasons that historians have leant into the “native Americans adopted horse culture only after seeing it in action” mindset is because no Native American culture (that I know of) domesticated an animal for riding around on. Like the zebra in Africa, the llamas and alpacas of South America could have been bred over generations to fill this niche, but as far as I know they weren’t, because the concept itself simply didn’t exist.

    Llamas and their kin just don’t have the strength-structure to carry even a small human on their backs for any distance.  (A backpack, yes, but a balanced static bundle is quite different from a rider.)

    Zebras are *extremely* aggressive, with each other as well as with ‘predators’ — much more so than horses / asses.   They’re tough to keep penned, much less to train for riding / packing.

    We moderns tend to underestimate just how lucky our ancestors were to have wild horses around for domestication!

  32. 32.

    scav

    I’d also want a bit more data demonstrating horses were integral to society, plus a far more precise declaration of integral how.  Are you feeding that horse grain in the winter because you absolutely need them to do something practical (etc etc spell it out, plus at least evidence they’re doing it) or is it being fed grain because it’s so unusual that it’s a sort of status thing, which may be a different form of integral to society thing but again, needs more evidence to back it up.

  33. 33.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Feathers: ​
     

    We have a real problem in this country because “property rights” are seen as making any sort of land use planning impossible.

    True, but I’m not sure what that has to do with the solar v. cattle/crops brouhaha. It sounds like the landowners want to put up solar panels because they’re paying good rent, but when they need a special use permit (Virginia), locals are objecting.

    And I’m gonna guess out west, a lot of cattle ranchers don’t own all the land that their cattle graze on: in arid lands, it takes a lot of acreage to support a cattle herd. But if landowners opts to rent to a solar power company rather than cattle ranchers, there’s some unhappy ranchers.

  34. 34.

    lowtechcyclist

    @schrodingers_cat: ​
     

    I don’t listen to podcasts

    I can relate to that. Seems that a lot of people like them, but I’ve never figured out why I’d spend my time listening to a recording of someone telling me about something, when I could read it in 1/4 the time if they’d bothered to write it down.

  35. 35.

    Gvg

    I find the supposed accepted history surprising and not what i was taught actually. The escaped horses went wild and multiplied at a huge rate. There were very large wild herds by the time the west was being explored and settled by whites and the natives definitely had horses before they had much contact with Europeans. The spanish too noticed.

    Its hard to say they were completely influenced because there were multiple explorers but it seems obvious the natives figured out a lot on their own including their own training and riding styles.

  37. 37.

    Eunicecycle

    @lowtechcyclist: I also prefer to read rather than listen. I feel I comprehend better. There used to be a theory that some learners are visual and some our aural, but I don’t know if that’s still an operational theory.

  38. 38.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: Virginia may not be alone in that counties require special use permits for solar arrays on land zoned for agriculture.

    I never learned much about the opposition, but it may have been ginned up by groups connected to the power company. There might be some preservationists involved, but this was in the triangle between Waynesboro, Sherando and Stuart’s Draft, pretty close to a humongous Little Debbie’s factory. There were already some small subdivisions nearbybso maybe some of those folks were enlisted in the opposition. But the parcels involved had marginal agricultural value. The solar project will probably be an interim use, holding a place for more subdivions to come in 20 years or so.

  39. 39.

    Geminid

    @Eunicecycle: My friend Joan listens to podcasts when she works on her gardens. She has a lot to weed.

    Joan’s always encouraging me to listen to podcasts while I do similar work. I tell her that my phone and I are not on speaking terms and I intend to keep it that way.

  40. 40.

    scav

    @Eunicecycle: There are also instances — like commuting or walking / exercising — where it’s just far more practical to listen to a podcast.  It’s not exactly the same as reading a technical paper or a book, but fine for general (especially off-piste) stuff and I often prefer it to music.  It’s just off being its own thing.

  42. 42.

    Eunicecycle

    @Geminid: I can see that, and have listened to a few when doing housework. But I prefer to read, which is admittedly sedentary.

  43. 43.

    Brachiator

    @bbleh:

    The point was not to mock previous research but ignorant ethnonationalist bigotry.

    I got your point. Some people are wrongly over emphasizing ethnonationalist bigotry. It’s tiresome bullshit.

  44. 44.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    One of the reasons that historians have leant into the “native Americans adopted horse culture only after seeing it in action” mindset is because no Native American culture (that I know of) domesticated an animal for riding around on.

    The explanations I’ve read are that Plains Indians figured out how to ride the feral horses that had escaped the Spanish many years before and quickly populated the area. It has nothing to do, or not much to do, with observation of European riders.

    Like the zebra in Africa, the llamas and alpacas of South America could have been bred over generations to fill this niche, but as far as I know they weren’t, because the concept itself simply didn’t exist.

    Zebras are notoriously difficult to domesticate. Many African peoples domesticated cattle and other animals.

    Similarly, hippos are tough to domesticate. Elephants can be trained, but not domesticated.

    Llamas and alpacas are also difficult for riding or domestication.

  45. 45.

    SteverinoCT

    @schrodingers_cat: Thanks to your earlier mention of this book, I got the Kindle version and am reading it now. Just in time to catch the paper on the earliest riders yet found. It’s very readable.

  46. 46.

    evodevo

    @Another Scott: No, zebras are definitely NOT…just like Cape Buffalo, they are aggressive, intractable and constantly looking for an opportunity to kill you…not exactly what you look for in a dependable work animal.   And even after 6 or 7 thousand years of domestication, there are a lot of horses who aren’t really behaviorally suited to use for riding/driving either…they end up in rodeos or meat counters.  If you aren’t in the industry, you wouldn’t have heard about the close calls any trainer/breeder has had…

  47. 47.

    Tony Jay

    @Geminid:

    Sorry, Twas bedtime for little Englishmen on their weekend away.

    Briefly, I think you’re underestimating the difficulty with which anything, including information, travels around between ‘primitive’ cultures, and overestimating the degree to which the North American tribes would have considered the conquest of the Aztecs anything to do with them.

    Cortez’s successful takeover was ASAIK less to do with the military impact of a few hundred gold-hungry Spaniards and much more about the scale with which native tribes who fucking HATED the Mexica were willing to work with the Spaniards. You could argue that the fall of the Aztecs was a native rebellion inspired and ultimately undermined by a few cunning Euro who they shouldn’t have trusted.

  48. 48.

    Tony Jay

    @Anne Laurie:

    The original horse populations of Eurasia weren’t any more suitable for dressage competitions. Weren’t they mostly Pygmy things that got used for pulling things around? Their backs weren’t capable of riders for many, many generations.

    The point is that selective breeding for size and biddability over a looooonnnnnnnggg time turned those tiny equines into the varieties of horses we have today. The same sort of process could have been used to transform other grazing animals into rideable mounts, but it seems that no one outside of Eurasia had the idea/time.

  49. 49.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

    The explanations I’ve read are that Plains Indians figured out how to ride the feral horses that had escaped the Spanish many years before and quickly populated the area. It has nothing to do, or not much to do, with observation of European riders.

    I said native riders, but I agree with your point, which is why I’m a bit confused about the whizz-bang what-an-upset nature of the article. The Plains horse cultures got their hands on a pretty much finished product of Eurasian biological engineering and adopted it super-fast and super-intensely. Well, yeah. That’s what people do.

    My point about the other animals that weren’t turned into rideable mounts is that very long term selective breeding can make even the craziest animal line biddable (the auroch, the wolf and the wild boar say hi) but South Americans and sun-Saharan Africans never seem to have felt the need to do it.

  50. 50.

    Geminid

    @Tony Jay: The tribes that allied themselves with Cortez might have been the ones to get horses first. They would have seen the military advantage the horses gave. The ones to the northeast would have been in contact with tribes in what is now Texas, maybe even the Mississipi Valley civilizations like the Cahokians. That’s one way horses and the practice of riding them could have spread.

    In any event, the Spanish made it up the Rio Grande Valley to New Mexico in 1598. The more nomadic tribes around the Pueblo peoples would  have seen them, and they would not have waited until the revolt of 1680 to take some of the horses for themselves.

    Or, there might have been wild horses in the upper Arkansas Valley by then. Some Commanches or Utes spying out the equestrian Spanish invaders might have said, “Those are some more of those weird animals we’ve seen east of here. So that’s what you do with them!’

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