My brother and I have been debating for quite some time about how horses aren't indigenous to the Americas while going over some holes that we had seen in the book or mormon.
When I had brought it to his attention, he went well out of his way to find an article on the matter via google. After about half an hour, he had finally found an article stating that there were horses here before its discovery. His argument before the search was that, "there are too many wild horses in today's time for them all to have been brought" and other things concerning how they all got here and how many became so wild.
I would love some insight from people who make history their profession. Please help me explain this to my brother in the plainest way possible.
Plainest way possible: Horses are not indigenous to America. The last native American horse died out during the Pleistocene.
Coincidentally, I was just reading the book Horse Nations: The Worldwide Impact of the Horse on Indigenous Societies Post-1492 by Peter Mitchell, published by Oxford. Your brother may have been confused by the article he found online or perhaps the article was incorrect or purposefully misleading. He was right in a way; there were horses in the Americas before Columbus. But WAY before Columbus...as in 40 million or more years before. North America was probably the home of the equus genus, which held scores of species and subspecies of horses that changed and merged over time or went extinct. They then migrated to central Asia where a few of them were domesticated. I’m not a biologist or a paleontologist, so I can’t trace the evolution of the various equine groups much beyond this. If you are, feel free to correct me.
However, as other users have said, horses in the Americas died out at the end of the last ice age. The last known evidence of native horses was found in North America around 7600 years ago in Alaska. In South America, native horses went extinct a little bit later but probably for similar reasons. It is a well established fact that this occurred, yet the reasons for the extinction are debated among scholars. Some posit that it was due to over-hunting by the first peoples in the Americas. There is evidence in both North and South America that horses were hunted by early peoples, but they did not seem to be their favored prey. Mitchell argues that extinction was most likely due to significant climate change that started well before the earliest arrival of humans and adversely affected the dry grasses that American horses and other mega-fauna consumed. This in turn may have sparked the die off of 35 large animals in the Americas as ecosystems were disrupted and humans encroached. So for thousands of years, there simply were not horses in the Americas. In fact, there are only a few domesticated animals in the Americas at all (e.g. dogs, guinea pigs, llamas, and alpacas).
Europeans brought horses back to the Americas, and horses became one of the most famous “exchanges” of the Columbian Exchange. How do we know? Aside from the overwhelming fossil record mentioned above and by other users, horses proved crucial for Spanish conquistadores to topple the mighty indigenous societies that they encountered after 1492. The surprise and terror that these creatures instilled in early indigenous groups is well documented in Spanish chronicles, challenging any assertion that there were still horses around. As for your brother’s argument that there were too many wild horses for them to be feral, this same argument was repeated by Spaniards 400 years ago. Horses and cattle alike took to many of the environments in the Americas quickly, as it was once their home and they mostly lacked natural predators. Horses multiplied at a staggering rate in North, Central, and South America. Alfred Crosby, probably the most famous historian on environmental change brought about by the contact, estimated that the population of feral horses in Querétaro alone had grown to 10,000 horses in a decade, while wild cattle had a doubling rate of 15 years after 1550 in Mexico. On the Pampas, the area that I study, there were so many wild (actually feral) horses by the 18th century that many Spaniards thought them native to the Río de la Plata. The Pampas were “covered with escaped mares and horses in such numbers that they look like woods from a distance” according to one traveler.
Indigenous groups all over the Americas recognized the horse for its value as both a foodstuff and a domesticate. Many societies learned to ride and use horses, which irrevocably altered lifeways all over the Americas. Famously, you see North American indigenous groups like the Dakota and the Apache becoming the quintessential image of “Native Americans” in popular culture while riding horses. In the Southern Cone, the adoption of the horse allowed indigenous groups like the Mapuche in Chile to transition from a predominantly settled agricultural group to one of the fiercest resisters of Spanish expansion. The group managed to remain independent in Patagonia until the 1880s and even spilled across the Andes, leading to a gradual process of araucanization on the Pampas. They mixed and eventually assimilated other indigenous groups, and they even raided within 30 miles of Buenos Aires according the Francis Bond Head in his travel journal from the 1810s.