Indigenous people of the American West used 'sacred' horses half-century earlier than thought

[Still Waters]

Centuries-old horse skeletons from the American Southwest are helping rewrite a colonial myth: When the Spanish colonized the region in the 17th century, they didn't introduce horses to Indigenous people, as long thought. Instead, horses were present in the Southwest long before Europeans, and were traded by Indigenous people who formed close, sacred relationships with them, a new study finds.

Horses lived in North America for millions of years but went extinct at the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago. When Europeans reintroduced horses to what is now the eastern U.S. in 1519, these hoofed mammals radically altered Indigenous ways of life, rapidly causing changes to food production methods, transportation and warfare. In the Southwest, historical Spanish records suggest horses spread throughout the area after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, when Indigenous people forced Spanish settlers out of what is now New Mexico. But these records, made a century after the revolt, do not align with the oral histories of the Comanche and Shoshone people, who document horse use far earlier.

https://www.livescience.com/indigenous-people-of-the-american-west-used-sacred-horses-a-half-century-earlier-than-previously-thought

Research paper published Thursday (March 30) in Science

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adc9691?

[Piney]

The horses of the upper Plains have more French pottock genes that Spanish ones. They probably contributed to the spread because it was actually French explorers and traders who introduced the horse to the Lakota before they were even driven onto the Prairie by the Objibway. 

But these facts are always ignored....