Indigenous Americans and Horses

These rock carvings from southern Wyoming date to the early 1600s and relate to the ancestors of the Comanche and Shoshone American Indians. Clearly pictured is a scene with a rider on a horse. The choice of subject — horses among indigenous Americans — is also the focus of a groundbreaking study published in _Science Magazine_ just last week.

In it, a team of scholars bringing together archaeology, radiocarbon dating, and isotope and ancient DNA analysis figured out that horses were introduced into American Indian culture on a massive scale, with great rapidity, and with a much earlier date than had been previously thought. (*Horses had originated in the Americas but had died out long before — at least 5,000 years ago*).

The old idea was that although the Conquistador Hernán Cortéz brought over horses to Central America in 1519, horses were generally not spread around North America in Indigenous cultures until the 1700s. This new analysis pushes the date back to the 1500s — it argues that within decades of the Spanish leaders’ intrusion into the New World, American Indians had begun to domesticate and use these animals.

Horse DNA from Wyoming and Nebraska reflects this new dating, as does analysis of the horse bones themselves. A site near Albuquerque New Mexico called Paa’ko, for instance, shows that the Pueblo had used domesticated horses in the 1500s.

Overall, the entry of horses into indigenous cultures radically changed their societies: they could move farther, faster; trade networks were reshaped; and military maneuvers and political alliances were very different. But because all these changes happened outside the view of Europeans — who didn’t enter the Midwest or much of the Southwest for another century (late 1600s and 1700s), these changes had gone unrecognized outside of American Indian communities until now.