Exposing the Columbus Myth by following the horse

Hello all,

bc] Were Columbus's voyages to the Americas a diversion to keep Europe's eyes away from what was really happening?

Exposing the Columbus Myth by following the horse

Before you make any decisions there's an interesting article about the pre-Columbian horse in California.

cs
.

Loved this post. The second link tells the science of it. Sounds like they were quite impressed with the horse and burro.

Maybe some indigenous nomads rode them up from Mexico.

The Norse were thought to have cut timber in Newfoundland and Labrador. Wonder if they ever shipped in some ponies for the heavy lifting? No records of it...

The only problem is documentation. The earliest known documentation of the discovery and trade in North America was around 1000AD.

Hello Frosty and all,

Regarding Exposing the Columbus Myth by following the horse

Frosty commented] The only problem is documentation.

bc] We can never know what actually took place during the tumulus times of the Dark Ages and the Spanish Inquisition that dominated the times of Columbus .. so [other than the matters of the ships, and the Arabs and Chinese which are historically accurate] I phrased it as a "probability. "Saying at the end:

When nothing makes sense about Columbus discovering America, and when nothing makes sense of orthodoxy's insistence. The horse is something to think about!

I've raised horses too long to believe the "they got away" story!

bc
.

There's a lot of things that need to be explained, so perhaps you can address these:

* ancient rock art shows no pictures of horses in the Americas (though they do in Europe.) After the Europeans brought horses, then rock art beings to show horses and riders.

* no modern horse bones found until the 1500's and beyond, though we have plenty of deer bone and rat bones and mouse bones and squirrel bones and bison bones (one site I worked on had lots of bones of game animals dating from 1000 BC... but not a single horse. And they're big, and kind of hard to miss.)

* no Native language word for horse until Euorpeans show up. In areas where people walked in to talk to natives, there's no word for horse.

* reports of natives being terrified at the sight of horses.

* no gear designed for horses (though there's plenty of traces of gear for dogs (like travios and so forth)

* no ancient clothing of horse hide though there's plenty of hides of other animals.

* no use of horsehair for thread or other uses before Europeans show up.

* why the notion of three ships was used when Columbus and others didn't start bringing horses over until his second voyage (with 17 ships, not three):
www.cdli.ca...

* why the data for the other conquistadors is discounted (they also brought Andalusian type horses) and arrived in much greater numbers shortly after Columbus did (Cortez and Pisaro, who brought horses AND wagons among other things):
www.ucalgary.ca...

* why De Soto, the horseman, who arrived in 1539 with horses and 600 men isn't figured into this:
www2.worldbook.com.../explorers&page=html/newworld_spanish_other.html&direct=yes

* why you think that if someone was building a permanent settlement (purpose of the early voyages after conquest), they would NOT bring over mares *and* stallions.

* how they'd manage a voyage with a bunch of cranky stallions in close quarters (wouldn't geldings and mares have done better, with only the leader riding the high-status stallions?)

* why the new native American horse looks more like the Andalusian ancestors and Arab -based thoroughbred stock (including genetically) than it does the short-maned Asian horse available and used during the great Chinese voyages?
www.ialha.org...


(FYI for everyone else: Chinese horses BEFORE the advent of the Westerners were very distinctive-looking animal -- Przewalski Horse.
www.imh.org...

Some Indian/Arab stock mixing was introduced in India and there was some mixing of breeds after the 1200's. In general, though, breeds in China and Japan stayed quite small:
www.imh.org...

More recent Asian breeds like the Yili horse developed from crossbreeding with other stock (Russian, etc):
www.imh.org...

Your absolutly correct byrd, before the spaniards brought horses, there were none in the new world. The indians thought the spanish were half man half animal gods(they saw the spanish riding horseback). There was a species similiar to horses in north america but died out in pre-historic times.

...and Columbus' expedition was all about gold, actually.

At the time, Spain and England were fighting (actually, Spain was constantly fighting with everyone and had been for centuries: libro.uca.edu... ). They'd run out of money several times and had borrowed heavily and were buying mercenary armies from other countries to conduct their wars.

www.interlog.com...


(I happen to be researching military history for a book chapter.)

Hello Byrd, XphilesPhan and all

bc] That's an extensive amount of research, Byrd, but I don't think it applies here, because the purpose of my study was to evaluate the decision making process ahead of Columbus's voyage in 1492.

Even then we have the horse in the Americas first pre-Columbian horses are being found all over the country.

We must also consider the smallness of the European ships and their inability to sail into the wind .. hence they followed the ocean currents and used the tail-winds: Here are some indisputable facts:

A.] Columbus's own journey was limited by his provisions.

1.] Each horse weighs 1000 lbs or more. Just 10 horses would weigh 5 tonnes.

2.] They drink up to eight gallons of water a day

3.] They eat a third to half a bale of hay a day [that's 20-30 pounds of hay per day, per horse]

4.] Horses require a stall or standing room of at least 40 sq ft each.

5.] The passage across the Atlantic took Columbus 20 days [just to the outlaying islands] and they were running short of provisions.

Before anyone invested in that expense and risk .. you can bet they knew what lay ahead. And that is the point of Columbus and the horse

bc
.

Originally posted by beforebc
...
Even then we have the horse in the Americas first pre-Columbian horses are being found all over the country.
...

Before anyone invested in that expense and risk .. you can bet they knew what lay ahead. And that is the point of Columbus and the horse

Your first link says nothing about the horse being precolumbian. It says the horse was dated 50 years prior to the establishment of the San Diego Mission. The Spanish were running around California years before the missions were established. The horse was dated circa 1625 -- thats 133 years after Columbus -- not precolumbian.

Your second link is just another speculative private website of unsubstantiated accuracy. The internet is filled with them.

Originally posted by beforebc
...
Even then we have the horse in the Americas first pre-Columbian horses are being found all over the country.
...

Before anyone invested in that expense and risk .. you can bet they knew what lay ahead. And that is the point of Columbus and the horse

Your first link says nothing about the horse being precolumbian. It says the horse was dated 50 years prior to the establishment of the San Diego Mission. The Spanish were running around California years before the missions were established. The horse was dated circa 1625 -- thats 133 years after Columbus -- not precolumbian.

Your second link is just another speculative private website of unsubstantiated accuracy. The internet is filled with them.

While prehistoric cave paintings do seem to be of Przewalski's Horse....the Chinese horse was already cross bred with arab and other western breeds before the Spanish horse was brought to the new world. Chinese horse

I have often wondered about the 'spread' of the horse across the N. American cont., the eastern most Native Americans did not seem to be the most 'horse adapted' tribes, even though they would have been among the first to 'see' the Spaniards' horses. While the Nez Perce tribe in the far NW corner seemed to become quickly adept at horsemanship and selective breeding. ( I believe they were heavily dependent on fishing first.)

Not to say they had the horse before the Spanish brought them, but some Chinese art shows the 'spotted coat' similar to the Appaloosa that facinated the Nez Perce.....and, you hardly ever find that particular breed associated with the Spanish. There may be a simple explaination for this, I just thought it odd.....

Hello all,

Conventional thought [and efforts to validate them] contends that the horse wasn't around before the Spanish. So finding the pre-Columbian horse has been made very difficult. It's true that the article dated the horse find at 50 years prior to the establishment of the San Diego Mission c1625 .. but the article also clearly stated it wasn't Spanish.

So here now is another horse and it is pre-Columbian.

In the Milwaukee Public Museum there is the skull of a mustang excavated in 1936 by W.C. McKern from a mound on Spencer Lake in NW Wisconsin (47BT2), and vouched for by McKern in the _Wisconsin Archaeologist_, Vol. 45, #2 (June 1964), pp. 118-120. Says McKern , "there remains no reasonable question as to the legitimacy of the horse skull that we found as a burial association placed in the mound by its builders."

C-14 dates on stuff from the mound are all pre-Columbian:
AD 890 +/- 65
AD 760 +/- 60
AD 750 +/- 60
AD 900 +/- 50

So it remains for us to keep looking in advance of the shovels of those assigned to validate conventional thought.

bc
.

Last I checked; horses evolved on North America/that region but were killed off during the last Ice Age.

As for the Skull you mention beforebc, they only dated the objects around it and not the skull. In 1996, Pat Fazzio asked them to date the skull using the C-14 technique and they have yet to do it. So it can't really be called upon as evidence.

[email protected]
There are also several other sites which claim it is a fake:
archaeology.about.com...

For the record (and for those of you discussing this who may not be aware of it), "Pre-Columbian" means "Any time before 1492 - 1500." Remember also that this falls into the date range where C14 dating starts to get iffy (1500 and onward.)

Pre-Columbian does not necessarilly mean "incredibly ancient."

Originally posted by beforebc
Hello all,
Conventional thought [and efforts to validate them] contends that the horse wasn't around before the Spanish.

It's not only conventional thought -- it's the Native Americans themselves who say this. If horses had been here, they would have hardly missed them!

So finding the pre-Columbian horse has been made very difficult. It's true that the article dated the horse find at 50 years prior to the establishment of the San Diego Mission c1625 .. but the article also clearly stated it wasn't Spanish.

Wasn't one of the Spanish breeds, yes. But there were a lot of horses around and both Drake and the Spaniards made tours up the California coast well before 1600, and by then wild horse herds were beginning to be established across North America.

bc] That's an extensive amount of research, Byrd, but I don't think it applies here, because the purpose of my study was to evaluate the decision making process ahead of Columbus's voyage in 1492.

...

Before anyone invested in that expense and risk .. you can bet they knew what lay ahead. And that is the point of Columbus and the horse

Exactly. But there weren't breeding stock horses brought until later in the 1500's, after they found that there was something worth exploiting here and a large land to explore. There weren't horses on the first voyage.

The first breeding stock came with the men who were establishing permanent bases in the Americas (because it's easier to come with a stallion and mares and breed your own riding horses than it is to send across the ocean every time you lose a horse or it dies.)

Nez Pierce horsemanship was determined by two factors -- they knew horses gave a decisive edge to the whites and began breeding their own horses... AND ... they were in ideal horse country. Horses need a steppe like environment to thrive in. They do poorly in forests and places like Texas are just fatal to them without supplemental food, so you'd never see large herds of them.


...and then there's the social organization of horse herds, but that's a whole 'nother story.

Are we to believe that Native Americans [themselves who say this] are now historical evidence?

And of course we wouldn't want to date anything found around an archelogical site [but of course that includes all sites .. right .. everywhere?]

And as regards [by 1600 wild horse herds were beginning to be established across North America] I'm gonna have a sit-down talk with our mare .. she's given us one foal in three years .. and if a few strays can breed a nation I'm being cheated.

No I think you need better evidence than that .. [what you say about herds of horses breeding themselves into countless numbers .. is pure impossible] .. besides no horse I've seen, or heard tell of, would cross the desert of the American S.W., without prompting. They'd stay where the grass was rich!

bc
.

[edit on 20-7-2005 by beforebc]

There are tenuous records of all sorts of pre-"discoveries" of America. The only intelligent viewpoint is to see that Columbus was the LAST European to discover America, not the first.

Some early sailors from Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, the North Sea countries, all may have been shipwrecked, never to be heard from again, long before 1492. They may have had ponies.

You said.

Beforebc

It's true that the article dated the horse find at 50 years prior to the establishment of the San Diego Mission c1625 .. but the article also clearly stated it wasn't Spanish.

The article says.

From North County Times.com
Alternately, Mojado postulated that the horses may have been Spanish in origin, perhaps from an ill-fated exploration that never returned and so was lost to history. Perhaps the lost Spanish explorers offered the horses and donkey to the American Indians as a gift, Mojado said.

"There were no horses here then," he said. "They didn't know what a horse or a donkey was. They would have seen them as big deer or antelope."

As a gift, and an unusual gift at that, the animals most certainly would have been revered, which could explain why they were buried high on a hill in the same way some Indians buried their own, Mojado said.

I would say thats very plausable. I would even suggest that maybe they could have been stolen from the Spanish, and traded between other Native Americans.

What does this mean?

Are we to believe that Native Americans [themselves who say this] are now historical evidence?

Of course we do , because it is evidence.

*************

Heres a Question , if horses were here , then why dont we find horse hair anywhere? It was widely used after the introdution of horses to Native Americans, if they were here before that , why don't we find Horsehair being used ?

Originally posted by beforebc
Are we to believe that Native Americans [themselves who say this] are now historical evidence?

Why on earth would you doubt reports of the Spaniards who say the Indians were afraid of horses because they'd never seen anything like them? Or other reports of Indians being bewildered by horses.
college.hmco.com...

You're saying that everyone who talked to the Indians and wrote down what they said were out-and-out liars and that the Indians actually had horses hanging around and nobody noticed? Horses are kind of big. You'd think explorers and trappers and priests would have noticed something that was horse-sized wandering around camp.

Or are you trying to say that the Indians threw blankets over them and danced up some magic and said, "nope! Those aren't horses! They're BUFFALO! Honest-Pete! We wouldn't lie!"

Horses were important to the explorers. They noted the vast buffalo herds, the pronghorn herds and so forth. I really thaink that Europeans, unlike Indians, knew a horse when they saw one.

Or are you speculating a Morphic Field Of Stupidity that hit America so that Europeans suddenly thought horses were strange looking elk for a few hundred years?

And of course we wouldn't want to date anything found around an archelogical site [but of course that includes all sites .. right .. everywhere?]

YOU were the one who brought that site up as proof. When everyone chimed in and pointed out that you misread it, NOW you try to sneer at the archaeologists?

They're okay as long as they prove your poorly researched theory but the minute they report something contrary, they're stupid crackpots?

That's not terribly even-handed.

And as regards [by 1600 wild horse herds were beginning to be established across North America] I'm gonna have a sit-down talk with our mare .. she's given us one foal in three years .. and if a few strays can breed a nation I'm being cheated.

Maybe you should instead look at the difference between wild horses and tame horses? You apparently think they're the same. But after 400 years, they're a different sort of animal:
* Smaller than domestic horse
* Able to live in poorer areas
* Wild horses breed at earlier ages
* Wild horse herds increase at the rate of 18% per year
www.cnr.uidaho.edu...

You might also sit down with some geneaological researchers and start looking at ship manifestos and how many people were coming to America and bringing their horses with them, not only from England but from France and Spain and many other countries.

No I think you need better evidence than that .. [what you say about herds of horses breeding themselves into countless numbers .. is pure impossible]

It wasn't "countless." By the 1900's, there were about 2-3 million of them. And they were being augmented constantly by human interaction.
www.wildhorsepreservation.com...

.. besides no horse I've seen, or heard tell of, would cross the desert of the American S.W., without prompting.

They didn't. The California horses were brought in by the Spaniards and bred there. They came by ship and didn't trot all across the Mojave and over the mountains. Some were ridden in by the Conquistadores.
www.returntofreedom.org...

They'd stay where the grass was rich!

Depending on environmental pressures, yes. But a lot of them moved into areas where the grass wasn't quite so good and evolved to live there by becoming smaller and shorter and breeding more quickly.

Reading the site at the link Indellkoffer provided, I found the following:

"Obviously, Indian tribes carried out an active trade in horses, since many were skilled in training and rearing horses prior to contact with non-Indian explorers........
In 1754, Anthony Hendry, a Hudson's Bay Company employee, met horse-mounted Indians in what is now Saskatchewan who were skilled in buffalo-hunting horsemanship.

The southern tribes brought the horse northward; numerous tribal histories note this fact. The Shoshones are credited by the Blackfoot, Flathead, and Nez Perce tribal oral traditions as having delivered the first horses to them.

Later, tribes such as the Nez Perces, Flatheads, Pend Oreilles, and Kootenays, located west of the Rocky Mountains, were noted for having large numbers of horses. Many of these horses crossed the mountains and contributed to the buildup of herds on the Great Plains.

Certainly, word of the horse preceded its actual sighting and use. Tribal histories abound with stories of first sightings and initial possession, as well as many elaborate and mystical tales of how the horse came among the tribes. The tribal names given to the horse reflect the mystery associated with the animal. Elk dog and big dog are common names that remain today in the languages of many Plains tribes."

While none of this disputes the claim that the horse originally came from the Spanish.....it does show that the Indians themselves did not always give 'credit' to the Spanish for bringing the horse. They had gotten them from other tribes or even the 'Great Spirit' had sent them.......often having them before the influx of the white traders into their regions......

....the historians mentioned on that site do date the time of the aquisitions as 'post Spanish explorers', but if some tribes had the horse before the first white traders arrived......I do see how the question of whether there was another source could arise.

Hello Indellkoffer, frayed1 and all

Indellkoffer wrote] Why on earth would you doubt reports of the Spaniards who say the Indians were afraid of horses because they'd never seen anything like them? Or other reports of Indians being bewildered by horses.

bc] The two horses in the early mist photo on Exposing the Columbus Myth by following the horse are my horses. They are the gentlest of creatures, and can be trained to ride simply by loving them .. then putting a blanket across their back, and finally just laying crosswise on their back, and than a saddle.

No native Indian would be bewildered by this gentle creature.

frayed1 wrote] "Obviously, Indian tribes carried out an active trade in horses, since many were skilled in training and rearing horses prior to contact with non-Indian explorers ..."

bc] I agree with that premise! The Conquistadores [who represented the Crown and the Church] came to destroy and suppress, and IMO, they knew what they'd find and where to go. That requires prior knowledge and cover-up. And part of that cover-up would have been to destroy everything that would suggest that the those in Central America were an advanced civilization.

bc
.