[Geneticist Beth Shapiro, (Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology / Shapiro/Ancient DNA Lab/ Santa Cruz, CA), examines a partial upper jaw bone of a Yukon horse, from the frozen mud at Quartz Creek, from Ice Age Klondike, courtesy of the Government of Yukon and Dr. Grant Zazula examines of this 26,000-year-old mummified horse (Equus lambeii) head, foreleg showing preserved hair, hide and muscle tissue, hoof, recovered at Last Chance Creek, Yukon, from Ice Age Mammals of Yukon, courtesy of the Canadian Museum of Nature.]

 

Discoveries Reveal That Horses Survived in America. Horses crossed the bridge and gradually spread all the way into southern Asia, Europe and Africa. Those in Europe and Asia became true horses called Equus caballus, while in the Americas. the Ice Age horses of the Americas were the same species as the modern horse of the Spanish returned to the Americas.  The Spanish Horse in Post Columbian America 1492 to 1776. As time passed, new scientific discoveries kept pushing the supposed date of extinction of America's horses closer to the present day.  Now it seems clear that there probably was no such extinction at all.  

 

Recent DNA analysis of a frozen Yukon Horse carcass found in the Alaskan permafrost in 2009 showed that horses were still living in North America as recently as 7,600 years ago (5600 BC), according to researcher Ross MacPhee, the American Museum of Natural History's Curator of Mammalogy. There had to be another source of horses in order for these herds to grow so large in as little as 150 years. It seem that, instead of Spanish horses repopulating the Americas, they simply added new blood to the native horses that were already in the Americas.  

 

The hypothesis is that the Spanish horses joined up with small groups of indigenous horses, it would have improved the survival of these quality Spanish horses, and the offspring of these two types would have had increased hybrid vigour, increasing their survival rates and therefore resulting in more animals reproducing each year. (Site owner's note - Horses make babies every 11 months. Some mares can wait two or more years to start thinking about having another foal.) While the genetic allele for Spanish blood is actually quite rare except in relatively closed populations such as the Spanish Mustangs, (Inter-Mountain West), equine geneticist Dr. E. Gus Cothran, of Texas A&M, noted that it only takes one individual horse to introduce the Spanish gene into a population.  Paul S. Martin, said that there was no reason why horses could not have survived in isolated areas of North America as late as 2000 B.C. Recent discoveries are revealing that horses may have been present in North America much longer, even right up to the time when Europeans “reintroduced” horses to the Americas. (Paul S. Martin,  Science 179, 1973).

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Ancient DNA reveals late survival of mammoth and horse in interior Alaska. The extinction of woolly mammoth and horse in northwestern North America is currently placed at 15,000–13,000 calendar years before present (yr BP), based on LADs from dating surveys of macrofossils (bones and teeth). Advantages of using macrofossils to estimate when a species became extinct are offset, however, by the improbability of finding and dating the remains of the last-surviving members of populations that were restricted in numbers or confined to refugia. Here we report an alternative approach to detect ‘ghost ranges’ of dwindling populations, based on recovery of ancient DNA from perennially frozen and securely dated sediments (sedaDNA). In such contexts, sedaDNA can reveal the molecular presence of species that appear absent in the macrofossil record. We show that woolly mammoth and horse persisted in interior Alaska until at least 10,500 yr BP, several thousands of years later than indicated from macrofossil surveys. These results contradict claims that Holocene survival of mammoths in Beringia was restricted to ecologically isolated high-latitude islands. More importantly, our finding that mammoth and horse overlapped with humans for several millennia in the region where people initially entered the Americas, challenges theories that megafaunal extinction occurred within centuries of human arrival or were due to an extraterrestrial impact in the late Pleistocene.

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Comparison with the Fossil Record.  Currently, the youngest macrofossil ages for mammoth and horse north of the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets in northwestern North America are 11,500 ± 160 and 12,480 ± 80 14C yr BP, respectively. These correspond to calibrated (calendar year) age ranges of 13,100–13,710 and 14,180–14,960 yr BP at the 95% confidence interval. The recovery of mammoth and horse DNA from the 10,500- to 7,600-year-old sediments suggests that both species survived in interior Alaska for at least 2,600 and 3,700 years longer, respectively, than established from macrofossil surveys north of the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets.

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Concluding Remarks.  Animal DNA from modern environmental samples has been used to detect secretive organisms present at low densities. Our study shows that the same approach can be extended to extinct animals, to detect their former geographic ranges and latest appearance dates. For this purpose, we chose the woolly mammoth and horse, finding that small populations of these megafaunal species persisted well into the Holocene in northwestern North America. The prolonged overlap of humans, mammoth and horse, revealed here by the application of the sedaDNA aka dirtDNA, approach, suggests that the timing and process of extinction of other species in the Americas and on other continents should be reassessed using a similar strategy.

www.pnas.org/content/106/52/22352.long

 

A Lehi, Utah family working on a landscaping project ended up finding the bones of an ancient horse. The family eventually uncovered most of a complete skeleton. While the head was missing, (The skull had been shattered and moved when the landscaper cleared the land) the bones that were found were almost perfectly preserved. This horse is nearly 16,000 years old.  Paleontologists identified the skeleton of a horse from the ice age.  A particularly unusual discovery given that much of the western part of the state was underwater until about 14,000 years ago.  As more and more ice-age Horses are being found in backyards and river beds all over the USA, NOW it is a documented fact America's Wild Horses are a NATIVE animal to the Americas. Native Horses that have been covered with layers of mud, ash and BLM bull-shit.  Buried for thousands of years, the remains were discovered only when the Hill family began moving dirt around their backyard to build a retaining wall and plant some grass. Laura Hill said she and her husband, Bridger, uncovered the skeleton last September, (2017), but didn’t think much of it at first.  Mrs.Hill consulted a neighbor, who is a geology professor at Brigham Young University, who examined the bones, and guessed they were from a horse from the Pleistocene Era.  Lehi is about 15 miles from Provo and was once mostly farmland that hugged the edges of nearby Utah Lake.  www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/science/horse-skeleton-utah.html / May 3, 2018

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