Native Americans incorporated horses into their communities far earlier than European colonial records suggest, according to a groundbreaking study Thursday that combined archaeological and genetic analysis with Indigenous oral traditions.
The study is the first using both Western science and traditional knowledge to be published in the prestigious Science journal, the researchers said.
Based on European records from the colonial era, historians have long argued that Native Americans did not interact much with horses in the American West until the late 1600s.
Scholars often say the turning point was the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when indigenous people staged an uprising against Spanish colonizers in what is now New Mexico, freeing many European horses in the process.
However, the new research, which traces the spread of horses from the American Southwest to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions, contradicts this widely accepted theory.
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The team analyzed hundreds of horse remains using radiocarbon dating, DNA sequencing and other tools to demonstrate that the animals had spread widely across the American West in the early 1900s. 1600s.
They also showed that horses were bred, received veterinary care, and were used for transportation by indigenous communities during this time.
This meant that horses were part of Native American social and ceremonial traditions “prior to any documented European presence in the Rockies or the Central Plains,” according to the study. said.
‘Historical’
The findings are consistent with a range of Indigenous oral histories that have long challenged European narrative.
“Before this study, there was literally no place for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the horses that we lived and protected with, in this conversation,” said Yvette Running Horse Collin, member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and co-author of the paper.
“This is due to the systems put in place by colonization,” she told a press conference in Toulouse, southern France.
Rather than one “scientific system dominating another”, research has shown that “science can be used to heal and unite rather than divide”, she added.
William Taylor, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado and first author of the study, said “a myopic and narrow view of European perspectives has unfortunately limited our collective understanding of the integration of horses into Indigenous societies.”
Ludovic Orlando, study co-author and CNRS paleogeneticist, said the research was “historic”.
“We put mainstream science on the cover” of Sciencehe said at the press conference.
“Mutual Tongue”
While horses are known to have inhabited the Americas over 12,000 years ago, Orlando said there was an “absence of fossils” between then and the 1600s, the reason for which is not known. .
Fossils from the 1600s covered by the research had Spanish or Portuguese ancestry, genetic analysis has shown.
This “would fit well with the acquisition of the conquistadors,” Orlando said, adding that the discovery of more fossils could disprove that theory.
Orlando, who has previously used genetic analysis to disprove long-held theories about horse history, was contacted by Lakota researchers in 2018.
Running Horse Collin then moved to the south of France for two years to work at the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics in Toulouse.
“As an Oglala Lakota scientist, I have not been asked to change my methods, methodology and conclusions,” she said.
Orlando said different theoretical approaches sometimes made him think about how he communicated, which “was really not easy at many times”.
But he said they had found “a common language” and intended to continue their scientific collaboration.
Study co-author Carlton Shield Chief Gover, a member of the Pawnee Nation, said in a statement that admiration for horses extends beyond borders.
“We can talk to each other through our shared love for an animal,” he said.