Did Native Americans Really Have the Horse Before Columbus? Many of them say they did...

Here's a group of articles about the mystery of the horse in America.

• Here is my long post that deals with the general background of this matter. Based on a book by Frank Gilbert Roe.
• Part 2 of the above article.

  An important article by Hu providing information about a very tantalizing archaeological find in Wisconsin. Recently, Hu has initiated efforts to have it carbon-tested. Why wasn't it carbon-tested before? If the tests come out positive as to the precolumbian provenance of this horse skull, we would expect quite a stir. A discussion with various scholars followed. This one is with Jeffrey Baker. Were Native Americans generally so quick to borrow cultural ideas from outsiders? Why was the spread of horse in North America so rapid, if we follow the conventional view of this matter? This long article is about the testimony of James Adair who was, back in the 18th century, an independent trader and a good friend of the Chickasaw Nation.

• Some professional horse men and women joined in the discussion A response to Deborah.
• Some information about the Appaloosas, the horses favoured by the Nez Perce and Palouse tribes of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Some hotlinks are available in this file as well.
• A restatement of the conventional view.
• Curious information about the "piebald" or pinto horses in Spain. It is generally believed that the Spanish disliked such horses.
• This is my third long general article on this subject.
• This file, posted by Larry Elmore a while back, contains some more useful information about early horse in America.

And so, the investigation continues. Yes, there're still other promising leads besides the ones I've made available on this page already. The truth is out there. But it usually takes time to dig it out...

And here's an interesting link to Pony Boy's web site. He is a Native American author and educator who is trying to bring out the Native traditions of horse rearing as he received them from his people. He writes about this in his recent book.

As I mentioned before, many Native Americans believe that horse was in America many centuries before Columbus. Pony Boy gives one of such traditional narratives in his book, although, it needs to be noted, he generally tends to support the mainstream academic view of horse history in America.

Here's a picture of a very unusual "Przewalski horse".

This wild horse is still found in Mongolia. It is so different, it has 66 chromosomes as compared to the 64 that we find in all other horses. This is a very primitive kind of horse, the one probably quite similar to what the ancient peoples first domesticated. (Nevertheless, some researchers believe that it represents a whole different species as compared to our domesticated horses.)

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