Well, no, I'm not forsaking my atheist ways and returning to Mormonism, but this is interesting, and I'm sure the Mopologists will latch onto it.

https://boingboing.net/2022/12/05/horses-were-in-north-america-before-europeans-dont-tell-tucker-carlson.html

Work by Dr. Yvette Running Horse Collin challenges centuries of natural history, the historiography of the continent, and origin stories of the United States.

Collin's dissertation, toward her doctorate in Indigenous Studies from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, is titled "The Relationship Between the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and the Horse: Deconstructing a Eurocentric Myth."

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"This research project seeks to deconstruct the history of the horse in the Americas and its relationship with the Indigenous Peoples of these same lands. Although Western academia admits that the horse originated in the Americas, it claims that the horse became extinct in these continents during the Last Glacial Maximum (between roughly 13,000 and 11,000 years ago). This version of "history" credits Spanish conquistadors and other early European explorers with reintroducing the horse to the Americas and to her Indigenous Peoples. However, many Native Nations state that "they always had the horse" and that they had well established horse cultures long before the arrival of the Spanish. To date, "history" has been written by Western academia to reflect a Eurocentric and colonial paradigm. The traditional knowledge (TK) of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, and any information that is contrary to the accepted Western academic view, has been generally disregarded, purposefully excluded, or reconfigured to fit the accepted academic paradigm."

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No, it looks like somebody found that indigenous folklore among some tribes claimed that the tribes always had horses.

Ok, fine. There are Mormons, some even old enough to remember the endowment death oaths, who in full sincerity and righteous indignation claim the endowment didn’t have death oaths. Claims and reality don’t always match up, even when the reality is well known.

I think most of our mental image of native horse culture comes from the Indian wars in the American west of the 1860s to 1890s. Cowboys and Indians. The horse culture had spread up from Mexico. It was relatively new among the northern Great Plains tribes in the mid 1800s and was just beginning in the Pacific Northwest when the Europeans started serious settlements there.

American car culture became a thing about a hundred years ago, but to look around, you’d think we always had cars. It sure feels that way, even though we know factually that’s not true.

Evidence ?

Horses and camels originated in the Americas, but died out due climate change at the end of last Ice Age (grasslands became forests or deserts) and hunting pressure from newly arrived humans.

https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2012/11/29/why-did-horses-die-out-in-north-america/

While the genus adapted to life outside North America, the “home bodies” did not fare so well. Their extinction came quickly, as it did for many other large mammals on the continent.

They faced a changing climate, altering vegetation — and the arrival of man.


Biochemical analysis showed that some of the 13,000-year-old implements were used to butcher ice-age camels and horses.

The University of Colorado study was the first to identify protein residue from extinct camels on North American stone tools and only the second to identify horse protein residue on a Clovis-age tool. A third tool tested positive for sheep and a fourth for bear.

All 83 artifacts were shipped to anthropology professor Robert Yohe, of the Laboratory of Archaeological Science at California State, Bakersfield, for the protein residue tests.

“I was somewhat surprised to find mammal protein residues on these tools, in part because we initially suspected that the cache might be ritualistic rather than utilitarian,” Yohe said.

“There are so few Clovis-age tool caches that have been discovered that we really don’t know very much about them.”

Anthropology professor Douglas Bamforth, who led the study, said the discovery of horse and camel protein on the tools was the clincher for him that the tools were of Clovis origin.

“We haven’t had camels or horses around here since the late Pleistocene.”

The artifacts that showed animal protein residues were each tested three times to ensure accuracy.
Artifacts from the first Americans, known as the Clovis, cast some light on the relationship of these people with the horse.

I discovered some equine remains when I was excavating my property; I took photos, but the photos were Destroyed in the Seattle Fire of June, 1889;

I know that's true-accurate because 1889 was the year Washington State was admitted to statehood.

Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2022 11:58AM by GNPE.

I remember when this first came out. I'm still amazed that that dissertation got accepted, let alone published.

Two questions.

Is UA Fairbanks a respected institution?

Is there any evidence of reins, bridles, and bits at any ancient archaeological site in the Americas? That petroglyph looks suspiciously modern.

Dr. Yvette Running Horse Collin successfully defended her thesis. That's what a PhD is about even if the thesis is hogwash.

I want to see the thesis of Elder Old Dog.

It doesn't take much to defend a thesis that is not under attack by the people assigned to do so.

Imagine how appalled everyone would be if a Native American were roughed up by those assigned to educate her!  

And even MP Groberg of the Tokyo South Mission got a Ph.D. out of describing what a success his system was.

Whose Ph.D. factory do you trust more, BYU or U. of Alaska-Fairbanks?



I don't have a thesis; I have a Theseus!

> I don't have a thesis; I have a Theseus!

That from the man who thinks a thesaurus is a type of dinosaur.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/2022 03:07PM by Lot's Wife.

Yes, Fairbanks is a good institution. They have a really good archaeology program. However, this PhD was actually in Indigenous Studies.

>
> However, this PhD was in Indigenous Studies.
>

Okay, NOW it makes sense!

Thanks, Richard.

From the article:

"What they are trying to do is shorten the length of time that we were here to make us not as critical to this place. They say, 'Native people came over the land bridge.' Why? Why are they making us as having been from somewhere else? Why couldn't we have been here? That's number one. Number two is that Europeans are still credited for bringing the horses and introducing them to Native people. What does that mean? They are telling us over and over again that anything that they consider to be of value in our cultures is still 'derivative' of theirs."

This is a push back against what they see has having been done wrong using folklore and hearsay and not a presentation of evidence. The horse is just a weapon for culture wars in this case and, like most religion, science be damned.

Boing Boing is late to the show.

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2307946

Who cares? The FAIR folks don't. They claim that horses were really Tapirs. I wonder what a Tapir saddle looks like?


HH =)

A lot like a regular saddle but sized for a capuchin. Apparently Nephites and Lamanites were really small.

Their swords, discovered by explorers of the New World, were used to hold together sandwiches.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4786

"But now, quite suddenly, this history is being called into question by some who say the horse was never extinct in America. There are basically three groups promoting this, and it's a virtual guarantee that any published research you find that makes this claim was written by someone representing one or more of these groups. The first consist of Native American groups. Certainly not all Native Americans are on this bandwagon, but those who are generally come from the perspective that the histories of the horse and of Native Americans are deeply intertwined and they take some affront at the notion that European invaders should be due any credit for what was such an immense leap of progress for their ancestors. The evidence they present is mainly in the form of oral histories from various tribes. The second group of advocates are scholars working on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), who have long argued in favor of certain alternative histories in the hope of bolstering recognition of their Book of Mormon as a factual historical document. The Book of Mormon is full of horses in the Americas during Biblical times — a clear impossibility; this fatal error having been made because it was written during the 1800s by people who had no knowledge of equine history.

The third group of proponents are the ones who have brought this question into today's headlines, and they are the wild horse conservationists."

"For there to have been an indigenous American breed, it would mean that all genetic traces of its existence have vanished, totally replaced in just a few hundred years by a relatively tiny imported population. Given this evidence, there's simply no room for the indigenous horse conjecture to be correct. When we can go back through Terra's genes and find a single foundation sire like Janus, it's simply not mathematically plausible for the genes of an entire continent's founding population — genetically distinct from all European breeds — to have completely vanished from the genomes of all the horses ever sequenced by Texas A&M. The explanation, of course, is that there never was such an indigenous population."

I believe all things.

Everything is true if you choose to believe it.

"Lies are true in Heaven"
Bart Simpson