Horses lived in North America for millions of years and were still present when the first people arrived near the end of the Ice Age. Those native horses disappeared around the same time as the other megafauna, roughly 13,000 to 10,000 years ago. After that the continent had no horses until the Spanish brought them back in the 1500s.
A common misconception holds that these native horses were small, pony-like animals. Some species were modest in size, but others were not. Late Pleistocene horses such as Equus occidentalis reached sizes comparable to modern horses. The idea that all of them were undersized is incorrect. Size alone does not explain why they were never ridden.
No one anywhere rode horses in the deep past. Domestication and riding developed much later, on the Eurasian steppe, several thousand years after the American horses had already gone extinct. The earliest solid evidence of horse domestication appears around 5,500 to 5,000 years ago, and clear signs of regular riding come later still. By the time people in Eurasia began riding, the native horses of the Americas had been gone for thousands of years.
Image: Artistic reconstruction of a late Pleistocene North American horse (often associated with forms such as Equus occidentalis). Credit: Science Photo Library.
It is also true that many Indian tribes, especially Comanches, were superb riders of horses. 19th Century literature contains abundant praise of their skills. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, for example, described the Comanche as the ‘finest light cavalry in the world.’ WindTalker provides excellent information on American Indian history. The above is an excerpt from one of her recent posts. ABN
