• blackstampede@sh.itjust.works
      23·
      2 days ago

      North America didn’t originally have horses. When they were brought in, the Apache, more than any other indigenous group, structured their entire way of life around them. At least, that’s what I learned from Western movies.

      • JamesTBagg@lemmy.world
        7·
        24 hours ago

        Now, I’ve read that horses were native to the Asian continent and migrated elsewhere, eventually to the Americas. However, I was at the San Diego Natural History museum last night and they had a display that claims the opposite, that horses are native to then migrated out of the Americas.

        *37 seconds of Wikipedia browsing did teach me that native horses went extinct in North America about 8,000 years ago, then were later reintroduced.

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 day ago

          Camels are also native to north America, and similarly went extinct here after spreading to Asia then later got reintroduced

      • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        6·
        2 days ago

        Interesting. I knew about the horses being non-native. But the Apache part not.

        Is there something that made them more likely to benefit from being a horse-culture?

        Living on Steppes and Plains?

        • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
          16·
          2 days ago

          Horses are native to the americas. They evolved there and spreaded to asia but went extinct in america around the end of the ice age.

        • Stamau123@lemmy.world
          5·
          2 days ago

          They lived mostly in the southern Great Plains, extending into the desert, so I imagine horses would be great for them

        • blackstampede@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          2 days ago

          We have reached the limits of what I know on the subject. So, no idea. If forced to make an uneducated guess, I’d say it was probably some combination of environmental factors, a preexisting culture that fit particularly well with horses, and natural variation in adoption of new tech among different groups of people.