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CHAPTER 1
Horses in America Before Columbus
By Dr. Steven E. Jones
Shortly after the turn of the 21st century, I began a project to seek horse bones from sites in North America and Mesoamerica for the purpose of radiocarbon dating them. In this research, I was joined by Professor Wade Miller of the Brigham Young University department of geology, archaeologists Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales and Shelby Saberon, and Patricia M. Fazio of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center.
We secured horse bones for dating, some directly from the field. Then state-of-the-art radiocarbon dating was performed at Stafford Laboratories in Colorado, the University of California at Riverside, or Beta Analytic in Miami, Florida, employing Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) dating methods. The reliability of the AMS method of radiocarbon dating of bones is delineated in Radiocarbon.
Our goal was to provide radiocarbon dates for samples that appeared from depth or other considerations to be pre-Columbian. The time frame of interest can be expressed in terms of "Before Present" by convention and extends from 10,000 bp (thus, after the last ice age) to 500 bp (when Spaniards brought horses to America). The prevailing paradigm holds that there were no horses in the Americas during this time interval. The samples in our study can be divided into two categories according to their origins: Mexico and the United States. Forty-five Equus samples were obtained in Mexico. Based on AMS dating, there was one sample from the Ice Age period and six from the post-Columbus period.
Other samples had insufficient collagen in the bone to permit dating; collagen protein locks in carbon-14, permitting accurate C-14 dating. Thus, the laboratories require a certain minimum amount of collagen in order to proceed with the dating. There were no Equus samples found in this study in Mesoamerica for the time interval 14,700 BCE to 1650 CE. By contrast, in North America there are found Equus samples, which do indeed appear in the time frame between the last ice age and the arrival of Columbus.
The first of these was found in Pratt Cave, near El Paso, Texas, by Professor Ernest Lundelius of Texas A&M University. Professor Lundelius responded to my inquiries and provided a horse bone from Pratt Cave, which dated to BCE 6020 to 5890 BCE. This date is well since the last ice age into the time frame when all American horses should have been absent according to the prevailing paradigm.
Another Equus specimen was identified by Elaine Anderson, an expert on Equus identification, at Wolf Spider Cave, Colorado. It dated to 1260 to 1400 CE — again, clearly before Columbus. Note that horses arrived on the New World mainland with Hernan Cortes, in 1519 ce. Dr. Patricia Fazio of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, in Cody, Wyoming, has joined our network of researchers in this field. Dr. Fazio ([in] private communication) alerted us to a horse bone found at Horsethief Cave, in Wyoming, which dates to approximately 3124 bp (i.e., 1100 BCE) using thermoluminescent methods. We attempted to have this bone re-dated using the AMS methods, which are more accurate, but there proved to be insufficient collagen in the bone to permit AMS dating. The 1100 BCE date (although approximate) still stands.
Dr. Fazio also pointed to a publication, The Wyoming Archaeologist, in which results of a horse bone found in Wyoming were dated to 1426 to 1481 CE (one sigma calibrated dates) using AMS methods, long before Columbus. The authors express difficulty in explaining this early date: "These radiocarbon dates place the horse skeleton at a very early age for modern horses to have been in Wyoming."
A paper by Dr. R. Alison notes evidence for horses in Canada dating 929 hundred years ago, also in the period of interest. However, the complete extirpation of ancestral horse stock in Canada has yet to be completely confirmed, and a bone found near Sutherland, Saskatchewan, at the Riddell archaeological site, suggests some horses might have survived much later. The bone has been tentatively dated at about 2,900 years ago.
Another Equus sp. bone found at Hemlock Park Farm, Frontenac County, Ontario, dates to about 900 years ago. Exhaustive confirmation of both bones has yet to be completed, but if they prove to be authentic, they comprise evidence that horses survived in Canada into comparatively modern times.
Thus, there are a half dozen dated Equus samples that date in the time frame 6000 BCE to 1481 CE, well since the last ice age and all before Columbus. Note that all of these radiometrically dated Equus remains were found in North America.
In addition to this hard physical evidence, a number of researchers are looking seriously into oral histories of Native Americans, which point rather clearly to the existence of horses before the Spanish arrived. In particular, we note that research results have been published by Yuri Kuckinsky. For example, the Appaloosa horse appears to have been in North America before the Spanish brought European horses. A January 2012 publication describes progress in DNA analyses of horses which promises to open new avenues for this research:
In recent years, many scholars have embraced the hypothesis that the Botai or other inhabitants of the Eurasian Steppes became the first people to tame the wild horse, Equus ferus, between four thousand and six thousand years ago. This theory implies that horses were domesticated in a similar manner to other modern livestock, such as cattle, sheep and goats, said Alessandro Achilli, a geneticist at the University of Pavia, in Italy. DNA analyses have revealed little genetic variation among these animals, suggesting that they descended from a small group of ancestors tamed in just a few places, he explained.
But when Achilli and a team of fellow researchers collected maternally inherited mitochondrial genomes from living horses in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, a strikingly different picture emerged. "We found a high number of different lineages that we were able to identify — at least eighteen," said Achilli, a coauthor of a paper outlining the findings in the January 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ... Why would disparate groups in far-flung corners of the globe hatch similar schemes to forge partnerships with their equine neighbors? "The very fact that many wild mares were independently domesticated in different places testifies to how significant horses have been to humankind," Achilli said. ... "The latest findings have the potential to open new avenues for further research into horses both modern and ancient," Achilli said. Now that a large number of horse lineages have been defined, they could be easily employed not only to analyze other modern breeds, including thoroughbreds, but also to classify ancient remains, he explained.
In particular, the Equus samples that have been identified in North America, anomalous because they date to the "excluded" period between 6000 BCE and 1490 CE, can now be analyzed to determine whether or not the DNA corresponds to domesticated Spanish horses brought over by the conquistadors. My prediction is that the DNA will not so correspond.
In conclusion, using state-of-the-art dating methods, we, along with other researchers, have found radiometrically dated evidence for the existence of horses in North America long after the last ice age and before the arrival of Columbus. These data challenge the existing paradigm. Further DNA analyses will provide additional data and insights.
CHAPTER 2
Plants Connect the Old and New Worlds
By Dr. Carl L. Johannessen
Evidence from 14 plants indicates their presence in both the Old World and America before 1492 ce. We found that drugs and medicinals, such as tobacco, coca, marijuana, datura, and prickly pear, were probably the moneymakers for seafarers connecting both sides of the Atlantic Ocean even millennia ago. The carbohydrates corn and amaranth would also have been attractive, as they were transported after being harvested and dried. The technological benefit of agave, a succulent plant with rosettes of narrow spiny leaves and tall flower spikes, as fiber for caulking ships made it a very attractive commercial product. For instance, the fruit of the Annona that may have been loaded originally to resist scurvy could have had its seeds dried and carried home as an additional rationale. Annona is a plant having a permanently woody main stem or trunk, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground.
The peanut, kidney bean, lima bean, and phasey bean were especially useful to the pre-Columbian sailors, because they are dry and are a reasonable source of concentrated protein and carbohydrates for onboard food. Basil must have interested the ancient voyagers, due to its light weight and high trade value. Many contacts between people of cultures on both sides of all Earth's oceans took place before Columbus first sailed to America. Until the advent of radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis, there was really no definitive way to prove an alternative theory of contact between people from civilizations separated by distant seas in different hemispheres.
But new evidence of dated discoveries demonstrate tropical sailors from both sides of the world did indeed exchange plants, diseases, and animals. Emphasis here is on certain plants that were moved and whose remains have been discovered in archaeological excavation horizons and radiocarbon dated to the period prior to the turn of the 15th century ce. Under discussion are those pieces of evidence for which there can be no dissent, because the physical remains of the plants involved were discovered on foreign shores, not their continent of origin, and distributed throughout the new continents into their own proper ecological niches.
Although we describe research focusing on tropical sailors and cultures, we fully acknowledge the important evidence and contribution of Norse mariners of the pre-Columbian era. The fact that there is acknowledged genetic, artistic, cultural, and biological evidence for regular and repeated contact between these Nordic peoples and populations of the northeastern region of North America simply strengthens the hypothesis we are proposing about the tropical sailors of southeast Asia, India, Africa, and the Middle East. The northeast American region supplied relatively few plant exchanges.
Certain rules of evidence have been accepted as a definitive way of ascertaining the quality of the data studied. American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould (1941–2002) once observed that the chances of a living species evolving in two places continents apart independently were so astronomically low as to be an impossible occurrence. The process of evolution is so complex and depends on so many specific conditions that no two places on the planet would ever compare closely enough on another continent for a long enough period of time to allow a species to develop identically in both continents without the presence of the wild ancestral species.
Therefore, hard evidence for early interaction between cultures separated by the vast stretches of ocean between the Americas and the Old World would have to come from showing that living species somehow were taken between hemispheres prior to the historically accepted Voyages of Discovery and after the time of the earliest human migrations to the Americas from East Asia, Europe, or Africa.
Discovery, settlement, and trade are the most obvious reasons for how the transfer of plants and some animals took place, but this report will deal only with the plants.
When people travel to a far land to trade, capture, or settle, they bring things from their homeland as reminders of their roots, and they discover new items, some of which are taken back to the home country. Humans inadvertently carried micro-organisms, parasites, seeds, and small animals on their persons and in their ships long ago, when they went exploring. On returning home, if they had found plants or animals that would be useful to them, they could have packed them up and delivered them to their homelands. With new organisms, the returning mariners could be expected to have known the ecological niches from which they came, and supplied them to their homeland's appropriate niches. Evidence shows that the sailors did, in fact, have this information, on the basis of where the plant remains were found archaeologically.
In the 1970s and 1980s, John Sorenson, professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University, began a massive, annotated bibliography of the available literature published in professional books and journals relevant to demonstrating whether there was sufficient evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic diffusion to warrant a new look at this theory. After the first two volumes were released in 1990 in the affirmative, a second edition was published in 1996, improving his selections and adding new sources. His two volumes of bibliographies detail hundreds of articles that either infer or directly state that biological species and cultural traits were transferred prior to 1492 ce. If only one or two plants or animals could be discovered as having been transferred, the previously accepted explanations could still explain a few exceptional, accidental travels.
However, Sorenson found indications of a sizable number of organisms and asked me if I would cooperate with him in the production of a report on species of interest for further research. We collaborated and have now positively identified 124 species. These included 97 plant species that have decisive evidence of
/// pre-Columbian transoceanic diffusion. Eighty-four of these 97 plant species originated in the Americas and were transported across the oceans to various locations in the Old World. Fifty of these plants were taken from America to their proper ecological niches in India.
We researched and indexed a large number of these plants to decide how strong the evidence was. We found archaeological evidence of the plants or their biochemical signatures in hemispheres where they did not originate. The archaeological data that had been published in scientific literature contained sufficient information about 15 species that we present now in an attempt to stimulate scientific study of the data. We present the evidence by species for your evaluation.
Drugs, Tobacco, Coca, and Marijuana
Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) and the coca plant (Erythroxylon novagranatense) are both native plants of the Americas, whereas marijuana (Cannabis sativa) is a native plant of the Middle East. These three plants have been used for millennia in the Middle East, Egypt, and Peru. Taken together, these three plants are strong evidence of trade among early transoceanic cultures. Each plant would have been used for medicinal or religious purposes, and therefore would have a high sales value for the sailors trying to maximize their profits and still fit the cargo into their relatively small ships. Archeological data disagree with the extant academic Post-Columbian Diffusion Hypothesis. Many of the natural mummies found in Peru have been tested and demonstrate their long use of the native tobacco and coca plant leaves. In the process of these tests, the mummies were also tested for THC, the active ingredient in Cannabis sativa, as well as the residue of presumed nicotine/coca chemicals.
In many of the mummies — 60 of the 70 studied — one or more of these chemical traces were discovered. The chemicals were discovered inside the hair, teeth, and tissues of the mummies. In 20 of the mummies, researchers discovered the chemicals to which THC breaks down upon ingestion. This indicates that the people who were later mummified were using the Middle Eastern marijuana prior to their deaths. These mummies have been accurately dated to between 115 CE and 1500 ce, in Peru.
Moreover, several researchers studying ancient Indian and Chinese peoples have found metabolized nicotine in the bodies of many pre-Columbian populations. Although there is a remote possibility that another plant may have been responsible for the buildup of the metabolized chemicals from tobacco, it is not likely considering the concentrations they found; and the most rational and economical explanation was that the tobacco leaf was present in Southern China from 3750 BCE!
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lost History of Ancient America"
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Copyright © 2017 Frank Joseph.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
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