A Prodigal Return

• Main Author: Mitchell, Peter
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2015
• Subjects: Newcomer; Pacific; North Atlantic; Siberia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198703839.003.0008

It is one of the great ironies of history—equine and human—that the continent on which the horse was born was also the continent on which it died out. For after more than 40 million years, sometime between 12,000 and 7,600 years ago, the last truly wild horse in North America was no more. And yet, as it turned out, that animal’s last breath marked not an end, but only a hiatus, one that ended when Columbus—on his second trans-Atlantic voyage—brought horses to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. This chapter therefore looks at four interrelated questions: the initial arrival of people in the Americas over 13,000 years ago; the variety of horses that they encountered there; how far their interactions with those horses contributed to the latter’s extinction; and how the horse returned to North America following Columbus’s voyage. When, where, and how people first arrived in the Americas remain some of archaeology’s most hotly contested topics, but we do know that horses were there to welcome them. Before considering how these two different mammals—the bipedal newcomer and the quadrupedal native—interacted, we need to answer the questions with which this paragraph began. Almost certainly humans entered the Americas from Siberia: early settlers in the western Pacific reached no further east than the Solomon Islands, while arguments that eastern North America was reached from Europe by Upper Palaeolithic hunters moving by boat and across ice around the North Atlantic fly in the face of both technology and chronology. But if the ancestors of Native Americans did indeed arrive in the New World from Asia (something that all genetic analyses of both modern and ancient populations confirm), when and how did they do so? Until recently the archaeological consensus—especially among Anglophone scholars in North America—was that this occurred around 13,000 years ago and was effected by people taking advantage of the globally depressed sea levels of the Last Ice Age to cross the Bering Straits when they formed part of a much ...