What if horses didn exist

Horses were domesticated more than 5, years ago and have been deeply connected to humans ever since. In The Horse: The Epic History Of Our Noble Companion , Wendy Williams harnesses a lifetime in the saddle to explore our ancient relationship with the horse, from the cave paintings of Chauvet to the steppes of Eurasia, and the dude ranches of the American West to a laboratory in Texas where behavioral scientists are plumbing the depths of equine consciousness.

Talking from her home on Cape Cod, she explains why we are having to rethink our preconceptions about animal consciousness; how a mathematical horse fooled humans; and why missing that second cup of coffee to go and muck out the barn can bring rich rewards.

Tell us about how the horse, Clever Hans , was actually cleverer than humans thought - and what he teaches us about horse intelligence? Clever Hans was a horse that worked closely with his owner, and the owner believed that Hans could actually do math, and do it very well!

His owner would ask Clever Hans to do addition or subtraction tables and Hans would always come up with the right answer.

He became very famous but many people were skeptical, so there were a lot of tests. At first Hans succeeded in all the tests and showed that he could indeed do mathematical computations. What happened is that Hans would stand there with the person doing the questioning.

When it was the trainer, Hans was always right. As soon as that happened, Hans could no longer do the math. It turns out Hans was watching the human beings and the subtle clues that told Hans when he had actually gotten to the right number. For example, if the problem was 10 minus 5, and the answer was 5, Hans would tap his foot one, two, three, four, five times. But it turns out the person doing the questioning was giving an unconscious clue to let Hans know he had gotten to the right number.

Maybe the person would lean forward a little or look more excited. So Hans was reading the clues that people were giving off in this very subtle way, and giving the right answer. But the new thinking about Hans is that it showed how incredibly smart he was, that he could read clues in the human psyche so much more clearly than we can read clues in horse language. Don proved it did and that bats used it and went on to spend his career studying animals.

At that time, people believed only humans had consciousness. Toward the end of his career he wrote a book called Animal Minds , which claimed that animals have consciousness. When it first came out, Don got a great deal of flack. There were people who called it the Satanic Verses of the animal science world.

But as things progressed he came to be known as a leader in the field of consciousness in animals. He died about a decade ago. A definitive answer has eluded scientists, but improving techniques and the growing value of DNA analysis has painted a clearer picture of events surrounding their demise. While climate change dominates headlines in the modern era, it loomed large in the lives of the many species that inhabited the Americas thousands of years before mankind began belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The end of the Pleistocene epoch — the geological period roughly spanning 12, to 2. Evidence suggests North America was hardest hit by extinctions. This extinction event saw the demise of the horse in North America. It survived only because the Bering land bridge that once connected Alaska and Siberia had enabled animals to cross into Asia and spread west.

The end of the Pleistocene also saw the end of the woolly mammoth, American camels, dire wolves, short-faced bears, sabre-toothed cats, stag-moose, woolly rhinos and giant ground sloths. The story of the North American extinction of the horse would have been cut and dried had it not been for one major and complicating factor: the arrival of humans. Humans, too, made use of the land bridge, but went the other way — crossing from Asia into North America some 13, to 13, years ago. When we talk of a land bridge we tend to conjure up images of a narrow strip of terrain.

The Bering land bridge was no such modest affair. Its fortunes — and very existence — ebbed and flowed with rising and falling ocean levels. A colder period that ended some 10, years ago saw the land bridge reach about twice the size of Texas, and scientists have even given it a name — Beringia. You could even consider the current state of affairs, with a body of water separating Siberia and Alaska, as unusual. The land bridge has actually been in place more often than not during the past two million years or more.

It has come and gone for far longer than that. It first developed at least 70 million years ago and was a dry land route for the movement of plants and animals, including dinosaurs. The distribution and nature of much life on earth have been greatly influenced by this crucial land bridge.

Its appearance and disappearance would also have had an influence on climate, with the closing of the land bridge affecting ocean currents. The bridge enabled near-global distribution for some species. Mammals from as far away as Africa were able to spread north and east through Eurasia and into the Americas. Camels and horses instead went westward from the Americas, where their respective species had developed. Horses originated in North America million years ago.

These terrier-sized mammals were adapted to forest life. Over millions of years, they increased in size and diversified. Horses got larger in size and underwent other changes to their feet and teeth to adapt to changing environments. From five million to 24 million years ago, a number of horses occupied niches to which they had adapted, including grazing the spreading grasslands. It was about four million years ago that the genus of all modern horses arose.

The modern horse, known as Equus, evolved from the horse Pliohippus, which arose around 5 million years ago and was extinct by two million years ago. The genus comprised three species but quickly diversified into at least 12 species in four different groups.

They co-existed with other horse species which had evolved different features, but it was members of Equus which made a move that not only saved the genus from extinction but profoundly changed the path of humankind.

Equus occupied North America for the entire Pleistocene epoch, from about 2. Scientists believe Equus crossed the Bering land bridge around the beginning of the epoch.

Some made it as far as Africa to evolve into the zebras we know today. Others moved across Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa, evolving into the onagers and wild asses of today, both well suited to desert environments. Still others spread across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, evolving into the true horse, Equus caballus.

North America remained home to Equus species for most of the next 2. On the latest evidence, that was just years ago. Their extinction came quickly, as it did for many other large mammals on the continent. Artifacts from the first Americans, known as the Clovis, cast some light on the relationship of these people with the horse. A remarkable find of a cache comprising 83 stone implements within the city limits of Boulder City, Colorado, in provided scientists with invaluable insights.

Biochemical analysis showed that some of the 13,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.

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. The artifacts that showed animal protein residues were each tested three times to ensure accuracy. Evidence of early Americans hunting horses had earlier been uncovered by University of Calgary scientists, who discovered the remains of a pony-sized horse while excavating the dry bed of the St Mary Reservoir in southern Alberta.

About metres from the skeleton, they found several Clovis spearheads. Protein residue testing and examination confirmed they had been used to hunt horses. So does evidence of horse hunting place humans in the frame as being responsible for horse extinction? The weight of evidence suggests not. One compelling argument centres around the timeline: that the comparatively few humans were unlikely to have played a major part in the demise of a species that was already in decline from climate and vegetation change.

That said, recent discoveries point to a rather longer overlap during which both horses and humans lived in North America. Some scientists had earlier believed the evidence pointed to horses dying out some years before the arrival of the first humans — a view since disproved by the discovery of horse protein on Clovis tools. However, statistical analysis by Andrew Solow, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, offered a different view on the possible role of humans.

He explored the radiocarbon dating of the 24 most recent known ancient horse fossils. His analysis indicated the ancient horses of Alaska could have persisted until perhaps 11, years ago, providing an overlap of several hundred years. It was, he suggested, impossible to rule out human hunting as a cause or major contributing factor to North American horse extinction.

Horses, the evidence now suggests, may have survived in North America until years ago — some years longer than previously thought. The new timeline suggests an overlap with human habitation approaching years. Researchers who removed ancient DNA of horses and mammoths from permanently frozen soil in central Alaskan permafrost dated the material at between and 10, years old.

The findings suggested populations of these now-extinct mammals endured longer in the continental interior of North America, challenging the conventional view that these and other large species disappeared about 12, years ago. It is possible the researchers unearthed the tiny genetic footprint of the last few hundred ancient horses to roam North America. MacPhee and his colleagues decided that the permafrost around wind-blown Stevens Village, on the banks of the Yukon River, fitted the bill perfectly.

Cores collected provided a clear picture of the local Alaskan fauna at the end of the last ice age. The oldest sediments, dated to about 11, years ago, contained remnant DNA of Arctic hare, bison, and moose; all three animals were also found in higher, more recent layers, as would be expected. But one core, deposited between and 10, years ago, confirmed the presence of both mammoth and horse DNA.

To make certain there was no contamination, the team did extensive surface sampling around Stevens Village. Did it look like the original wild horses? It has been thought that their ancestors were a yet more primitive form and probably representative of wild horses, says Heintzman. In , researchers found genetic evidence that paintings of spotted horses were not just fantasy. The spotted pattern was a colour variant that the horses from the ice age could have had, LiveScience wrote.

It descended from early domesticated horses from the Botai culture and has since become wild. It may well be that there were once wild horses in Norway as well, says Heintzman. But the proof is difficult to find. Any and all older evidence of wild horses and other animals was destroyed. Scandinavia was free of ice, and there would almost certainly have been megafauna around here.

Translated by Ingrid Nuse. Read the Norwegian version of this article on forskning. Horses from North America and Europe were not completely isolated from each other over the last one million years. Illustration: Julius Csotonyi. Thus, management is often directed at total eradication, or at least minimal numbers.

If the idea that wild horses were, indeed, native wildlife, a great many current management approaches might be compromised. Thus, the rationale for examining this proposition, that the horse is a native or non-native species, is significant. The genus Equus , which includes modern horses, zebras, and asses, is the only surviving genus in a once diverse family of horses that included 27 genera. The precise date of origin for the genus Equus is unknown, but evidence documents the dispersal of Equus from North America to Eurasia approximately 2—3 million years ago and a possible origin at about 3.

Following this original emigration, several extinctions occurred in North America, with additional migrations to Asia presumably across the Bering Land Bridge , and return migrations back to North America, over time. The last North American extinction probably occurred between 13, and 11, years ago Fazio , although more recent extinctions for horses have been suggested.

Ross MacPhee, Curator of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues, have dated the existence of woolly mammoths and horses in North America to as recent as 7, years ago.

Had it not been for previous westward migration, over the 2 Bering Land Bridge, into northwestern Russia Siberia and Asia, the horse would have faced complete extinction. However, Equus survived and spread to all continents of the globe, except Australia and Antarctica. Critics of the idea that the North American wild horse is a native animal, using only selected paleontological data, assert that the species, E.

Herein lies the crux of the debate. However, neither paleontological opinion nor modern molecular genetics support the contention that the modern horse in North America is non-native. Equus , a monophyletic taxon, is first represented in the North American fossil record about four million years ago by E. Azzaroli believed, again on the basis of fossil records, that E. Idahoensis , and that species, in turn, gave rise to the first caballoid horses two million years ago in North America.

Some migrated to Asia about one million years ago, while others, such as E. In North America, the divergence of E. Today, we would recognize these latter two horses as breeds, but in the realm of wildlife, the term used is subspecies. By ecomorphotype, we refer to differing phenotypic or physical characteristics within the same species, caused by genetic isolation in discrete habitats.

In North America, isolated lower molar teeth and a mandible from sites of the Irvingtonian age appear to be E. Through most of the Pleistocene Epoch in North America, the commonest species of Equus were not caballines but other lineages species resembling zebras, hemiones, and possibly asses McGrew ; Quinn, By the late Pleistocene, the North American taxa that can definitely be assigned to E.

Both subspecies were thought to have been derived from E. Thus, based on a great deal of paleontological data, the origin of E.

However, the determination of species divergence based on phenotype is at least modestly subjective and often fails to account for the differing ecomorphotypes within a species, described above. Purely taxonomic methodologies looked at physical form for classifying animals and plants, relying on visual observations of physical characteristics. While earlier taxonomists tried to deal with the subjectivity of choosing characters they felt would adequately describe, and thus group, genera and species, these observations were lacking in precision.

Nevertheless, the more subjective paleontological data strongly suggests the origin of E. Reclassifications are now taking place, based on the power and objectivity of molecular biology. If one considers primate evolution, for example, the molecular biologists have provided us with a completely different evolutionary pathway for humans, and they have described entirely different relationships with other primates.