An innovative study that coupled archaeological and genetic studies with Indigenous oral traditions found that Native Americans adopted horses into their communities considerably earlier than European colonial records indicate.

According to the researchers, the study is the first to be published in the esteemed Science magazine using both Western science and conventional knowledge.

Historians have long argued that Native Americans in the American West did not engage substantially with horses until the late 1600s, based on European documents from colonial times.

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when Native Americans rose up against Spanish conquerors in what is now New Mexico, is frequently cited by academics as the turning point. This insurrection resulted in the release of several European horses.

The new study, which follows the migration of horses from the American Southwest to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, debunks this generally held belief.

The scientists used radiocarbon dating, DNA sequencing, and other methods to examine hundreds of horse skeletons and found evidence that the animals had spread widely over the American West by the early 1600s.

Also, they demonstrated how Indigenous people during that period nurtured the horses, provided for their medical needs, and utilized them for transportation.

Before any known European presence in the Rockies or the Central Plains, horses were a part of Native American social and ceremonial practices, the study concluded.

Historic

The results are in line with numerous Indigenous oral narratives that have long contested the European account.

According to Yvette Running Horse Collin, an Oglala Lakota Nation member and co-author of the report, "Indigenous peoples in the Americas, or the horses we lived beside and protected, literally had no place in this conversation before this study."

She stated at a press conference in Toulouse, a city in southern France, "This is because of the mechanisms set in place by colonialism."

The findings revealed that "science may be used to heal and to unify rather than divide" as opposed to "one scientific system dominating another," she noted.

The study's lead author, archaeologist William Taylor of the University of Colorado, lamented that "a myopic, narrow concentration on European perspectives has tragically hampered our knowledge of the integration of horses into Indigenous society as a whole."

The research, according to Ludovic Orlando, a paleogeneticist and co-author of the study from France's CNRS, is "historic."

He claimed at the press conference that "We've brought traditional science to the cover" of Science.

Mutual Language

Although horses are known to have lived in the Americas more than 12,000 years ago, Orlando claimed that from that period and the 1600s there is a "lack of fossils," the cause of which is unknown.

Genetic testing revealed that the 1600s fossils studied in the study were of Spanish or Portuguese descent.

The discovery of further fossils could refute Orlando's assertion that this "fits nicely with acquisition from the conquistadors."

In 2018, Lakota researchers got in touch with Orlando, who had previously used DNA analysis to refute well-established views about the history of horses.

After that, Running Horse Collin spent two years working at the Toulouse Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics in the south of France.

She claimed that as an Oglala Lakota scientist, she had not been requested to alter her research methods, approach, or findings.

Orlando claimed that various theoretical perspectives occasionally caused him to consider his communication style, which "was really not easy at numerous instances."

Yet he said that they managed to "find a mutual language" and that they plan to carry on their scientific cooperation.

Co-author of the study Carlton Shield The Pawnee Nation's Chief Gover stated in a statement that respect for horses transcends national boundaries.

We can communicate with one another since we both adore animals, he remarked.