Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

The first sentence in the article at 
http://home.att.net/~thepone/feral/evolve.htm states, "The free-roaming 
horses that graze the Americas today descend from European stock brought 
over from the late 1400's onward."  That pretty much excludes ANY stock 
that migrated across the Bering Straight.

What the author is saying in the following quotation is that all the 
millions of genetically successful horses in North (and South) America 
became extinct about 14,000 years ago, not that their successful 
genetics were passed on to our Mustangs.

Here is what the author said:

Except for bison and mammoths, horses were the most abundant large 
animal. Some scientists think they even outnumbered the bison. They 
migrated freely back and forth between North America and the old world. 
Highly adaptable, they were capable of living anywhere from the 
oven-like deserts, to periglacial tundra, to swamps, to mountain ranges, 
to open savanna. Horses were present in great numbers, almost everywhere.

Then suddenly, starting about 14,000 years ago, they vanished from North 
and South America, over the course of a few thousand years, (a mere 
eye-blink in the context of geological time). Where horses numbered in 
the tens of millions, suddenly there were none, for the first time in 
sixty million years.


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