Inverse has an article about the history of horses in America. It's not commonly known, but horses evolved in North America about 4 million years ago. They went extinct around 10,000 years ago with many other species of North American mega fauna. The causes of the extinction are still being studied. Horses were reintroduced by European colonists.
Check out the link to read about the important role horses played in the lives of early and later Native Americans.
Few places in the world are more closely linked with horses in the popular imagination than the Great Plains of North America. Romanticized stories of cowboys and the Wild West figure prominently in popular culture, and domestic horses are embedded in everything from place names, like Wild Horse Mesa, to sporting mascots, like the Denver Broncos.
Horses first evolved in the Americas around 4 million years ago. Then horses largely disappeared from the fossil record by about 10,000 years ago. However, archaeological finds from the Yukon to the Gulf Coast make it clear that horses were an important part of ancient lifeways for the early peoples of North America.
Millennia later, horses were reintroduced by European colonists, and eventually, the Great Plains became home to powerful Indigenous horse cultures, many of which leveraged their expertise on horseback to maintain sovereignty even amid the rising tides of colonial exploitation, genocide, and disease.
But how did horses become part of life on the Great Plains? And are there pieces of that story that may be missing from today’s popular narratives?
One of us is an archaeozoologist who studies ancient animal remains. The other is a Lakota scientist who specializes in ancient horse genomics and is an expert in Indigenous oral traditions about horses. Together we created a large team of scientists and scholars from around the world, including those from Pueblo, Pawnee, Comanche, and Lakota nations, and set out to see what archaeology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and genomics together could tell us about the horse in the American West.
