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The skeletal remains of a " crazy " distaff horse found buried in a big ancient lake in Utah and thought to engagement back 16,000 years to the last frappe age are actually no older than 340 years erstwhile , a raw discipline finds .
The ivory , excavate by landscapers in a Lehi , Utah backyardin 2018 , were ab initio dated to a period that ended roughly 11,700 years ago . But after canvass the sawbuck ’s remains , scientist realized that the hoofed animal was really a domestichorsethat subsist much more lately .
After unearthing its skeleton, researchers initially thought this horse dated to the last ice age. New analyses showed otherwise.
The initial age of the horse remains suggested this mare was wild ; such horses exist in North America from about 50 million to 10,000 class ago , disappearing around the same time that other large fauna , including mammoths , short - face bears , frightening wolves and elephantine sloths go extinct at the end of the last methamphetamine hydrochloride geezerhood . ( It ’s likely that a combination of climate variety and human fundamental interaction direct to their dying , research shows . ) However , the Modern findings suggest this horse — which died when it was about 12 years one-time — was domestic , date to post - Columbian times , after the Spanish infix the domesticated buck ( Equus caballus ) to the Americas starting in the sixteenth hundred .
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Many endemic mass who lived in the Americas " fleetly integrate " these European horses into their cultures and economies , the researchers wrote in the study . This mare , know as the Lehi horse , was no elision ; it was likely bring up , looked after and ride by autochthonic people who endure in what is now Utah , possibly by a member of the Ute or Shoshone community , study jumper cable source William Taylor , an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder , told Live Science .
Paleontologist Rick Hunter excavates the Lehi horse skeleton from a backyard in Utah.(Image credit: Bridger Hill)
" The Lehi sawhorse shows us that there is an unbelievable archaeological record out there of the early kinship between endemic people and cavalry — a record that tells us thing not written in any European chronicle , " said Taylor , who is also a conservator of archeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History , and just created adigital museum exhibitabout horses in the ancient American West .
“Epoch” mix-up
The mix - up happen because Indigenous people buried the horse in a pit surrounded by lake sediments dating to 14,000 to 16,000 years ago .
However , newradiocarbondating of the actual os and clues from the Lehi cavalry ’s anatomy and DNA now indicate that the female horse lived more recently . But because the carbon 14 sample did n’t give an exact result , " we can only say that this horse perish sometime after 1680 , " in all likelihood before the European colonist permanently moved into the Salt Lake region during the mid-19th century , Taylor say .
In addition , Taylor and colleagues found fracture on the Equus caballus ’s spine that suggest someone had repeatedly ridden the Equus caballus — either bareback or with a indulgent saddle stamp pad — bang up on down on the horse ’s humiliated back . Those fractures are a " kind of feature film that is pretty rare in a baseless animal , " Taylor said . " Once we looked closer , we observe other hint , including severe arthritis — and finally , genic data point help us to confirm this idea " that the gymnastic horse was the domestic horseEquus caballus , not an ice years wild equid .
Researchers examine the horse’s remains in the lab.(Image credit: William Taylor)
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Researchers make a 3D scan of the Lehi horse’s bone.(Image credit: William Taylor)
Despite the maria ’s injuries , people care for the cavalry , maybe because they wanted to multiply her with local stallions , the researchers said in the field , which was published online Feb. 4 in the journalAmerican Antiquity .
In addition , an analysis of the isotopes ( a variation of an factor ) in the sawbuck ’s tooth enamel revealed that it salute water and ate vegetation in the Wasatch Front part of Utah , suggesting " that the horse was put forward and run locally … near where it was found , " the researchers wrote in the subject .
in the beginning bring out on Live Science .
