SEPTEMBER 2016
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
Comanche on horse
A horse culture is a symbiotic relationship between
man and animal. The horse-dependent lifestyle of the
American Plains Indians of the 19th century offers an excellent example. But it is widely believed that long before
Indians in the center of this continent rose to prominence
on horseback, people half a world away domesticated
the uniquely compatible animal — just which people and
what exact place have been the subjects of much debate.
But according to history.com, “In recent years, many
scholars have embraced the hypothesis that the Botai
or other inhabitants of the Eurasian Steppes became the
first people to tame the wild horse, Equus ferus, between
4,000 and 6,000 years ago.”
Scientists suggest that the Eurasian horses were the
progeny of animals once native to North America that
became extinct on this continent at the end of the last
Ice Age, which they put at 10,000 years ago. These small
horses crossed from one continent to the other over a land
bridge between Alaska and Siberia that existed before the
big freeze.
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The equestrian revolution spread through China and
Europe and down into the Middle East and North Africa.
Centuries on, the Spanish developed an effective horse
culture, particularly concerning military tradition. It was in
the holds of Spanish galleons that horses returned to North
America. In the late 15th century column upon column of
mounted soldiers followed the gold-hungry Conquistadors
north from Mexico into what would become Arizona and
New Mexico and from there out onto the sprawling Great
Plains.
“With that, the horse had come home, completing a
ten-thousand-year circumnavigation of the globe,” Elliot
West wrote in History Now, The Journal of the Gilder
Lehman Institute. “In a sense, however, it was not the
same animal at all,” West added. “Horses had left their
birthplace wild. They returned in cultural partnership with
humans. The American Indians whose distant ancestors
had hunted and eaten horses millennia before now saw
them as living tools offering to expand their lives in ways
none could have imagined… .”