How Horses Conquered America (Twice)

American History Hit

History Hit

America, History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Horses have been a bulwark of American culture and society for centuries. Think of cowboys in the Mid-West or Native Americans riding bareback on the Great Plains. But new, ground-breaking archeological evidence has emerged to suggest horses were present in the Americas more than 10,000 years ago, shattering our previous assumptions that they were first brought to North America by the Spanish.

In today’s episode of American History Hit, Don speaks to Dr William Taylor about these new findings, exploring how the mighty horse conquered America, went extinct, and then conquered it once more.

Produced by Benjie Guy and Freddy Chick. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long

For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.

If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi everybody glad you could join us on American History Hit. I'm Don Wilden your host.
0:05.0	Listen to that sound and what do you hear?
0:11.0	The pummeling vibrations of charging horse hooves on the ground, of course.
0:15.0	Historically, the domestication and development of a working horse is commonly attributed to European
0:21.3	and Asian cultures.
0:23.7	In the Americas, the traditional story told
0:26.0	has always been that only when Spanish explorers
0:29.0	arrived in the new world, bringing
0:30.6	trained horses by ship, where native peoples made aware of the horse
0:34.5	and the plentiful ways they might use it.
0:36.5	Only then would those indigenous tribes acquire the horse
0:40.5	and begin to enjoy the great advances made possible by this new breed of animal.
0:45.2	They were suddenly free to move over greater distances, hauling greater loads.
0:49.4	They could hunt more effectively, more profitably.
0:52.2	They could make new and much more lethal kinds of war. Recent
0:56.0	archaeological studies of this horse human history of North America have called
1:00.3	that accepted theory into question.
1:03.4	And with us today is an archozoologist at the center of it all.
1:07.6	Dr William Taylor is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Curator of Archaeology at the University of
1:14.2	Colorado Museum of Natural History. Dr. William Taylor, welcome to American History Hit.
1:32.0	Hey, great to be here, Don, and thanks for having me.
1:34.0	Before we define the more modern historical revision you're a part of,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.