Horses and mammoths

I strongly suspect that the Ice Age extinction event of 10,000 years ago in North America wasn't really like that at all. There's loads of evidence that many of these animals survived much longer, even on to the very eve of white man seeing them—or even in the case of horses, that they never went extinct at all and that the horses that the Injuns rode on the prairie were descended from horses that they'd always had, not horses that they'd captured from the Spanish just a few generations earlier. However, because it doesn't fit the paradigm, that evidence is disregarded and even worse—discarded. So now it's no longer even around to be reinterpreted by someone who's maybe not quite so beholden to the model. It's not my purpose or desire to acquaint you with the evidence, if you're not already. It's my experience that people are usually unwilling to entertain alternative narratives to the mainstream narrative unless they do the work themselves to find the evidence. Although if could be I have the causality backwards; people are unwilling to do the work to find evidence for alternative narratives unless they're already willing to entertain them. Either way, people generally accept the narratives that they're fed, especially if they come from mainstream sources, and are dismissive of any evidence that contradicts that narrative, if they even know that it exists at all. But I will say that because hard evidence that could support a survivalist model no longer exists or has been ignored and discarded and is no longer available, the evidence is in the form of oral history and circumstantial logical conclusions. The former include, for example, this collection of accounts of mammoth sightings, and this collection of elephant-like artifacts that come from a time period where mammoths and mastodons were supposedly extinct already for thousands of years. There's much, much more, and if they start to sound a bit like reports of Bigfoot sightings sometimes, that's fair, I suppose, with at least two major exceptions: 1) sightings by people who wouldn't have any reason to be familiar with elephants but which can describe elephant-like creatures, like early reports by Indians in the 1500-1600s from the American colonies frontier, and 2) unlike Bigfoot, we know that mammoths, mastodons, horses, etc. all did live in North America. It's a question of when they went extinct, not if they ever lived there at all. The latter, on the other hand, is stuff like reports from Daniel Boone of Big Bone Lick, where they made temporary shelters out of mammoth (or mastodon) bones. The narrative story is that they were leftover from the Pleistocene, or that they fossilized, but both are unlikely; if the bones were exposed and could be extracted without considerable work from a stone matrix, then they wouldn't have been fossilized. If they weren't fossilized, there's no way that they survived for thousands of years exposed to the elements like that. The inevitable conclusion is that they must have been much more fresh than the narrative asserts is possible. 

But what I'm a little bit more interested in right now is the horse. There were many, many species of horse in the New World (and the Old) earlier, but some recent genetic evidence suggests that actually this interpretation was fallacious; there was only one species of horse in the New World during the Rancholabrean NALMA, although there may well have been numerous subspecies. And that this species is not a "horse", i.e. member of the equid family, but the actual horse—subspecies of the same animal as Przewalski's horse or the tarpan, which were domesticated and became what we think of as the horse today. (This is assuming Hagerman's horse had been more or less replaced by this point; otherwise, Hagerman's horse, Equus simplicidens, actually is probably a different animal that's more zebra-like.) Other animals like E. giganteus, coversidens, scotti, lambei, etc. should be interpreted as subspecies. The subgenus (Amerhippus) is done away with—although the genus Hippidion, while probably not a valid genus, is at least a proper lineage. Other non-caballoid lineages, which do have proper species designations are the various hemionic lineages (asses and donkeys) and the zebras.

Now, this is a rather radical approach, and you never know. After all, science also can't come to unity on the intepretation of Przewalski's horse; is it a separate species? A subspecies? Or just a breed that's been feral for a long time? (That last interpretation is fairly new, but it seems to be the most commonly accepted today.) To some degree, this all becomes a question of semantics, though—whether to call an animal Equus (Amerhippus) scotti or Equus ferus scotti is inside baseball to the taxonimists, and if the narrative told by genetic data is the same, it's a close relative of the same animal that was domesticated in the Old World and became our horse. We know also from genetic data that there were at least three separate horse domestication events in the Old World, but that only one of them still has surviving lineages among domestic and feral horses; that of the east European steppe; i.e., the Yamnaya or Indo-European domestication. The modern horse is, in fact, relatively inbred due to this domestication and breeding, and has only a very few y-DNA lineages extant in particular. In the natural state, although wild horses all probably had a much more similar physical appearance—like that of the Przewalski's horse, which also matches cave paintings from France at Lascaux—they had more genetic diversity. It was only through selective breeding that other physical traits, which were otherwise recessive and which would have appeared only rarely in the natural stock (many are, in fact, maladaptive in some ways) are able to propagate and become common. White coats being a notable example of this, for instance. 

There seems to be a relationship between horses and lions as well. Lions in Africa will eat all kinds of things, of course, including various antelope, wildebeest, warthogs, and even Cape buffalo, giraffes and young elephants on occasion, but they preferentially prey on zebras and wildebeest, who tend to herd together. On the American savanas of the Rancholabrean (keep in mind that geographically, the Rancholabrean was quite different than today. The jet stream was lower, pluvial lakes filled much of what is the Great Basin desert today, and oak savanas covered what is now open prairie or even semi-desert or desert) lions seem to have done the same with horses and buffalo. The American buffalo, especially the "antique buffalo" is a much larger animal than the wildebeest, but then again, the American lion was on average a good 25% larger than the African lion today too. 

I imagine that these wild horses had primitive markings, much like the Przewalski's horse or the cave paintings, or for that matter, like the konik or Heck horse breeds, which are either very primitive in their physical appearance, or were purposefully bred to resemble Ice Age wild horses in the case of the Heck horse. Dun or grullo coats, face masks, frosting on the mane and tail, leg bars, dorsal stripe, ear marks, possible pangare, etc.

The stereotypical Indian pony might be a good example of what they were like, since most likely that was the breeding stock many of them came from. The idea that an Indian pony was bred from Spanish stock, which was a much larger breed of horse, in just a few generations, and that the Indians became a horse centric culture to the same degree that the Huns or the Mongols did, and with the same skill, in just three or four generations, and had thousand upon thousands of heads of horse—it's really quite an absurd just-so story if you think about it very much at all.