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Native America Calling: Reassessing the history of horses
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Reassessing the history of horses
A new study confirms many tribes’ oral histories that Native Americans utilized horses long before Europeans entered the picture.
Previous theories attributed Spanish settlers with introducing horses to the Indigenous people they encountered in North America. Today on Native America Calling, we dig into a new study, published in the journal Science, that finds anthropological evidence which suggests tribes domesticated and bred horses almost a century before the Spanish brought horses to tribes in New Mexico.

Guests on Native America Calling
Chance Ward (Lakota from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe), grad student at the University of Colorado Boulder and a graduate research assistant at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History
Carlton Shield Chief Gover (Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma), assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana University and curator of public archaeology at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
For Native American cultures across the West, horses have been a fixture for ages. Indigenous histories, archeology & DNA show that role extends to the 1600s, a century before European records suggest. https://t.co/wXnUNr7tye
— U.S. National Science Foundation (@NSF) March 30, 2023
📷: Sacred Way Sanctuary#NSFfunded pic.twitter.com/rJQqCS3yPN
Sunday Read 📚
— CU Boulder 🦬 (@CUBoulder) April 2, 2023
An international team of researchers, including several scientists from #CUBoulder, recently revealed what might be the most exhaustive history of horses in the American West to date.
Learn more about their findings here! ➡️ https://t.co/HFlLfltc4D pic.twitter.com/1EeF6qaq8x

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