Native American people integrated horses into their communities much earlier than European colonial records suggest, according to an innovative study Thursday that combined archaeological and genetic analysis with Indigenous oral traditions.
ScienceBased on European records from colonial times, historians have long contended that Native American people did not interact much with horses in the American West until the late 1600s.
frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen> This meant that horses were part of Native American social and ceremonial traditions"before any documented European presence in the Rockies or the Central Plains," the studyThe findings are consistent with a range of Indigenous oral histories that have long challenged the European account.
These petroglyphs in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, depicting a horse and rider, probably date to the early 17th century. The site is connected with the ancestral Comanche and Shoshone people. Ludovic Orlando, a study co-author and paleogeneticist at France's national scientific research center CNRS, said the research was"historic".'Mutual language'
That would"fit well with acquisition from the conquistadors," Orlando said, adding that the discovery of more fossils could disprove this theory.
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