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Are the wild horses of the American W native?


Still Waters

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In the plaintiffs' favour, there is no doubt that North America is the ancestral home of horses. The horse family evolved there, and it is almost certain that the modern species, Equus caballus, was present in North America for almost 1.5 million years before dying out about 10,000 years ago.

On the other hand, today's wild horses are the feral descendants of domestic horses from Europe, with a 6000-year history of domestication.Whether these horses can be considered truly native thus hinges on whether a few millennia of foreign domestication are enough to "spoil" 1.4 million years of native evolution. Animal rights groups are adamant that they are not, but the BLM's website labels as "false" any claim that the horses can be considered native.

Settling the dispute will be difficult, especially because no wild, never-domesticated E. caballus survive for comparison. Pleistocene horse fossils exist, though, and the tiny amount of DNA that has been recovered from them shows no clear differences from today's wild horses, says Jacobo Weinstock at the University of Southampton, UK.

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There isn't any evidence in the fossil record to support a continuation from prehistory, they were re-introduced... IMO

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Most of the historical record would indicate that the horses were reintroduced after going extinct in the Americas. The natives were not familiar with them until after they were reintroduced.

Anyone know of Native art depicting horses previous to the reintroduction?

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Most of the historical record would indicate that the horses were reintroduced after going extinct in the Americas. The natives were not familiar with them until after they were reintroduced.

Anyone know of Native art depicting horses previous to the reintroduction?

None exist...

Edited by Pax Unum
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None exist...

Well, aside from Pleistocene art. :P

(Wow, spellcheck picks up Pleistocene but not any of the earlier eras?)

Domestication can cause changes much quicker than natural selection, so I would think they count as non-native.

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Well, aside from Pleistocene art. :P

(Wow, spellcheck picks up Pleistocene but not any of the earlier eras?)

Domestication can cause changes much quicker than natural selection, so I would think they count as non-native.

I'm not aware of any Pleistocene horse art from North America... I saw an exhibition with American horse art as early as 1680...

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mentions it in the article.

Are they talking about NA cave paintings? I've never heard any were found...

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Could have sworn there was rock art dating back that far, but I can't seem to find any reference to it. Seems they probably are using the cave art from France.

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Perhaps you're thinking of the Moon Flower Petroglyph’s, at most they could be from 500 A.D., since there's 'horses' it's more likely they're post 1540 A.D...

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No, I've been looking and it seems I'm mixing European findings with the Americas in terms of art.

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Though how is the horses being reintroduced after a few thousand years of no longer being here any different then many of the other reintroductions we had done for various other species. (Like the elk in the highlands of Scotland.. wolves in various other european areas and even here in the states)

Maybe a few degrees of evolutionary traits... But then it could also come down to the fact that the mustangs have been apart of the american west for a few hundred years now, why do we suddenly feel the need to wipe them out for "not being native"?

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The difference is, in the cases of the wolves and few others, they are the same species that were extinct in the wild.

However, the horses here are ones that continued to evole on another part of the word and were then domesticated, before being reintroduced to the Americas.

More along the lines of a white Englishman retuning to Africa, really.

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by these rules, none of the people living here are native either, not even the native americans.

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I think the question that could help this argument is how long does a species of to exist in an area to be considered "native"? One-hundred years? One-thousand? One-million? It makes quite a bit of difference in any case.

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Who need's Horses when you can ride A Saber Tooth or a Mamoth... lol I want a Saber tooth, why cant they Introduce it's Genes into a Tiger's Embryo?

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Who need's Horses when you can ride A Saber Tooth or a Mamoth... lol I want a Saber tooth, why cant they Introduce it's Genes into a Tiger's Embryo?

Actually you'd have better luck with cougars/puma as they are the closest descendants.

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Actually you'd have better luck with cougars/puma as they are the closest descendants.

thats true, do you know the extent of Animals that lioved in North America 10-15,000 years ago, like Large Ground sloth, Giant Cave bears and all sorts of crazy animals.

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thats true, do you know the extent of Animals that lioved in North America 10-15,000 years ago, like Large Ground sloth, Giant Cave bears and all sorts of crazy animals.

Mammoths

American(cave) Lions

Dire Wolves

Cave Bears

Camels

Horses

Sabertooth

whooly rhinos

ground sloths

Baluchitherium (a kind of tall hornless rhino)

And of course.. this little guy..

hyracotherium.jpg

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I really wish they didnt all die off, or get killed off! <_<

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I really wish they didnt all die off, or get killed off! <_<

Well not all died out or were killed off. Many just continued their evolutionary paths.

What is a shame now is.. we're causing so much damage not just to various species but to habitats that they can't adapt or evolve fast enough to survive.

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Well not all died out or were killed off. Many just continued their evolutionary paths.

What is a shame now is.. we're causing so much damage not just to various species but to habitats that they can't adapt or evolve fast enough to survive.

yah, like the Bison, there are only small heards of wild Bison, its sad! and everything is on the decline, there are only 5 or 6 Vancouver Island Marmot's.

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yah, like the Bison, there are only small heards of wild Bison, its sad! and everything is on the decline, there are only 5 or 6 Vancouver Island Marmot's.

Well, the Bison thing is probably more because early settlers just would not stop killing them. They're even accounts of people shooting at herds of Bison from trains just for kicks. It's sad really.

As evidence:

Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg

That, my friends, is a pile a Bison skulls. Humans kind of suck...

Fortunately a lot of efforts are being done nowadays to boost Bison populations and hunting them is very tightly regulated.

As for the horses, like I said, how long does a species have to live in a place before it's considered native? Any wild horses around now were all born here. Are they not native?

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Actually.. It wasn't just settlers. Native tribes would do mass killings as well. Drive whole herds over cliffs. Before them getting horses to use, it was slower and trickier. When they had horses, they could spook and drive even more over the cliffs. And they did not use everything of the animals..

So yeah.. humans on whole.. tend to suck. =P

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Actually.. It wasn't just settlers. Native tribes would do mass killings as well. Drive whole herds over cliffs. Before them getting horses to use, it was slower and trickier. When they had horses, they could spook and drive even more over the cliffs. And they did not use everything of the animals..

So yeah.. humans on whole.. tend to suck. =P

I'm not sure where you got that info because as I understand it the natives used the Bison as their primary food source as well as a source of hide for clothing. In fact when the European settlers came in and started killing the Bison because they felt like it it caused a food shortage for the natives.

I doubt the native tribes would have driven the Bison over cliffs if they needed them so badly, but perhaps it was a way of amassing meat. My point is that the natives had a real reason to hunt Bison: They had to eat. The settlers were doing it for kicks, which is wrong.

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