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A Sample Treasure Hunt Level : Level One (Life Sciences)
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Master of the Hunt



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On previous levels of this Treasure Hunt we established that the flora and fauna of North America made no sense if orthodox assumptions are correct. Either history is wrong or biology is wrong. By all means take potshots at biology, but in this level we're going to concentrate on the bits the historians have manifestly got cockeyed. This is of course a large subject but here we're going to concentrate on one aspect -- how the Plains Indians (that's the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Apache and so forth) got their horses.

To pass this level you have to come up with something cock-eyed, now you know what you are looking for. However I will give a free pass to whichever one of you first posts up the orthodox version, so that the rest of us know exactly what absurdities we are going to have to disassemble.
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Cool-hand Luke


In: Pontefract, Yorkshire
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Since I don't believe there's anything much wrong with the Official Version, I'm gonna bag my place in the next round by saying pretty much exactly as it was.

1. The horse was originally a North American species
2. It spread to the Old World God knows when
3. It was made extinct (along with a whole bunch of other large animals) by over-hunting when Early Man entered North America proper (c 12,000 BP)
4. The horse was re-introduced by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century.
5. Some of these horses escaped and, without much competition, multiplied excessively on the Great Plains.
6. Certain of the native North American tribes (the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Apache etc) took advantage of this by capturing and taming these horses (ie mustangs).
7. Having horses was so advantageous on the Great Plains for hunting buffalo et al that these tribes pretty much gave up sedentary living and became out-and-out horse nomads.
8. When the Europeans (ie the Yankees) reached the Plains in the nineteenth century that's exactly what they found!
QED
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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The way Luke puts it, it seems to be a series of "with one bound they were free". Just to make the simplest point: feral horses are gosh-darned hard to create: when a horse escapes, it runs around but not away. They are intensely social and don't stray by themselves. So the suggestion that a few Spanish strays went off and established new herds is hard to fathom.
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Tani


In: Fairye
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It's a long way from Central Mexico to the Plains, it would have taken a while for escapee Spanish horses to get there. The other problem is quantity: not many horses were actually brought over from Spain, a couple of dozen at a time on various voyages, and often they arrived in a pretty miserable condition. In 1507 there was a consignment of 107 horses which was the last legal shipment since 1493, after that date there was a ban on exporting horses to the New World.
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Cool-hand Luke


In: Pontefract, Yorkshire
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This is getting ridiculous. Once horses escape they go feral. That means they ride like the wind and breed like...er...rabbits. In four hundred years they could have repopulated several continents, never the mind just the Great Plains. After all, horses originally evolved to suit North America.
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Keimpe


In: Leeuwarden, Frisia
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But Luke, surely there isn't nearly as much time as you are saying. Remember, the Plains Indians would have needed quite a bit of time to learn to be horse nomads so there must have been a pile of horses a long time before the nineteenth century. Come to think of it, how do you catch a horse on the open plains when you haven't got a horse?
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Cool-hand Luke


In: Pontefract, Yorkshire
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Piffle! How long does it take to learn to do stuff when you can just copy the Spaniards?
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L R B Quirke


In: Auckland, New Zealand
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But Luke, if the Plains Indians were just copying the Spanish, how come

a) the Indians used horses to hunt buffalo whereas the Spanish used the horse for everything except hunting
b) the Spanish made a fetish of bit, bridle, spurs, saddle etc etc; the Indians made a fetish of riding without any aids
c) the Spanish went in for bigger and bigger horses, the Indians for smaller and smaller ponies
d) the Spanish used the horse as a symbol of social superiority, the Indians as a mark of equality
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Master of the Hunt



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Good point about the size of horses, Quirkey, expand on that.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Well, one thing's for damn sure and that is Orthodox Darwinian Evolution can't possibly produce herds and herds of exclusively "pinto ponies" running round the Great Plains if their ancestors were exclusively enormous Spanish horses escaping from agricultural and/or military duties. I'm prepared to believe that given thousands of years, the one could become the other but in a coupla hundred years....you must be joking. It is simply impossible. And that's the end of the Orthodox Version for good and all.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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More recently, a comparative study of mitochondrial DNA from living and fossil horses suggests that horses were domesticated in many places, at many times...This analysis showed that the modern horses had almost as much genetic variation as samples of fossil horses. By contrast, similar analyses of mitochondrial DNA had shown that modern individuals from cattle, sheep, water buffalo, and pig breeds are much less genetically diverse than their ancient forbears. Thus, it appears that a large number of wild lineages were involved in the domestication of the horse, many more than in any other domestic mammal, and suggests that the domesticated horse had ancestors in many places. Wikipedia

On basic Applied Epistemological grounds this has to be complete crapola. Domesticating a tiny, fleet-footed, grassland herbivore is not something human beings naturally do. The chances of two groups doing so independently is itself unlikely but they'd have also to do it at roughly the same time because, remember, a domesticated horse gives people a huge range so you'd have to be quick off the mark to domesticate your own horse before the first lot showed up riding over the horizon. So the suggestion that "horses were domesticated in many places, at many times" is just plain ludicrous. There's no question that orthodoxy must have the whole picture dead wrong.

The fact that horses have a genetic variation the same as fossil ones, whereas all other domesticated species have far less, can surely only mean one or more of the following
1. We are getting it wrong about "fossil" horses ie what we might call fossil horses are actually domesticates (putting the whole thing way back)
2. Horses were domesticated in a way unique among all the domesticated species
3. We know far less about genetics and domestication than we think we do.

Personally, I'd vote for the third possibility.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Ishmael, I've tracked down the original of your Wikipedia quote and a rather different picture emerges.

Evolutionary biologists at Uppsala University in Sweden studied mitochondrial DNA from 191 pedigreed horses, including examples of historical English and Swedish breeds considered "primitive," and one breed derived from animals imported to Iceland by the Vikings. They also obtained DNA samples from the Przewalski's horse. They compared these samples with fossil DNA from leg bones of horses that have been preserved in the Alaskan permafrost for more than 12,000 years and with other samples from 1000- to 2000-year-old archaeological sites in southern Sweden and Estonia.

This analysis showed that the modern horses had almost as much genetic variation as samples of fossil horses. By contrast, similar analyses of mitochondrial DNA had shown that modern individuals from cattle, sheep, water buffalo, and pig breeds are much less genetically diverse than their ancient forbears
.

You were right to be suspicious of "fossil" horses, they turn out to be 12,000 years old max (though the impression given to the unwary is that we're going back zillions of years.) Of course it goes without saying that orthodoxy assumes that these horses are wild whereas we have good reason to suppose they were already domesticated. And the present day horse sampling looks to be thoroughly unreliable too. I don't know what the position is in Sweden but "pedigreed" horses in England tend to mean "descended from four Arab stallions imported in the eighteenth century". And "historical" breeds can mean anything at all, it's an utterly unscientific term. As for Przewalski's horse, well all I can say is that it's the closest thing to a Pinto Pony I've ever come across.

As far as I can see, if orthodoxy would only concede that horses were in fact domesticated at least 12,000 years ago, then the genetic variation of the horse would actually turn out to be rather similar to all the other domesticated animals.
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Peter Elmy


In: London
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And why just the Plains Indians? If it's so easy to capture feral horses how come none of the other North American tribes (hundreds of them) availed themselves of this remarkably advantageous animal? I don't mean necessarily to become full-blown horse-nomads but you'd have thought, with horses (re)populating the continent, the natives would have made some sort of use of them, in some capacity or other. It looks to me like there's something weird about these Plains Indians. Either that or there's something weird about the version we've always been taught.
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Jenny


In: Central Victoria, Australia.
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Actually it's damned difficult domesticating horses. If riding them weren't a big enough challenge, you've got to stable them, rear them, breed them, feed them, doctor them, train them, cull them, dispose of them... Imagine having to catch them, domesticate them and make all this stuff up from scratch!

It's not a question of why the other tribes didn't do it but how the plains tribes did!
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Master of the Hunt



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Well, you've all done very well with the rider and with the horse but nobody has considered the rider-and-the-horse together. In other words just how odd is it that a horse-culture evolved on the Great Plains of America at all. The first thing to ask yourself is how odd are horse-cultures anywhere in the world. And the answer to that is that there have only been two in the whole of recorded history: the Mongols of Central Asia (to use a shorthand term) and the Plains Indians. So horse nomad cultures are very odd indeed.

But put together they get odder still. The horse nomads of Asia, insofar as we can judge, are extremely old and took an age to evolve. The horse nomads of North America are very new and took no time at all to evolve. But of course that's not the oddest thing about the Mongols and the Plains Indians when bracketed together, it's the fact that they appear to be the same damned people. They look the same, they're genetically linked, their religion -- shamanistic pantheism -- is the same, they ride horses the same way, their societies are constructed the same way. Even orthodoxy concedes the one are pretty much the direct descendants of the other. And yet, according to this same orthodoxy, as soon as we turn to the one critical fact about them (where they got their horse culture from) there is no connection whatsoever between them! According to orthodoxy it is a complete fluke that two branches of the same people both undertook the 'unique' step of becoming horse-nomads but without reference to one another! One did it under their own steam and the other did it because some Spanish horses strayed.

How can anybody believe such tosh? None of you, I'm sure.So, everybody on to the next level.
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