[SunkenCiv]

Even if the Indians killed horses for food is no reason to state the the Indians killed off the horses. It was pretty easy to discover the earth travels around the sun but to state things that can not be known is often ridiculous.

I wholeheartedly agree. There is no evidence that the horse was killed off by the tribes; there is also not one iota of evidence that the horse was reintroduced to the tribes by the Spanish.

Obviously the Spanish brought horses over, and obviously they used horses, but claiming that the descendants of the same tribes who supposedly hunted the horse to extinction, and had never ridden a horse, suddenly found the undocumented aliens -- undocumented because Coronado never mentions losing any horses, and certainly would have mentioned it had it been enough to provide a breeding population -- and decided to "break" them and ride them, is ridiculous on its face.

[fish hawk]

Love your tag line! Aloha

[Robert A Cook PE]

?

I think it was just coincidence that every large (food-bearing) large mammal in North America vanished at the same time the new (culturally-correct, pristine and non-threatening) 2-footed North American mammals arrived om scene.

Since only European white Christian males kill animals. The rest of the world is innocent. 8<)

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

claiming that the descendants of the same tribes who supposedly hunted the horse to extinction, and had never ridden a horse, suddenly found the undocumented aliens ...and decided to "break" them and ride them, is ridiculous on its face.

Except that the northern plains tribes do talk about the coming of the horse in their tribal oral histories. It's what allowed the Sioux, for instance, to move out of the Minnesota woods and onto the Great Plains in the early 18th Century, and to move from small shelters into bigger teepees that they could only transport with the help of horses and travois.

Archaeology shows no signs of pre-Columbian Indians using horses. No petroglyphs. No artifiacts. No horse bones have been found dating between the extinction ca. 10,000 years ago and ca. 1500 AD. Furthermore, Indians wouldn't need to just spontaneously figure out that you could ride these new animals. The Mexican Indians saw the Spanish riding and picked it up. Then it was just a matter of the next tribe north seeing that it could be done while the horse population exploded across the plains with ample food and no predators to speak of. Two hundred years is plenty of time for that knowledge to spread from Mexico to Minnesota.