Emily Chan
In 2018, the skeletal remains of a female horse were unburied by landscapers in Lehi, Utah. The bones were buried in a backyard that was once an ancient lake.
They were thought to date back 16,000 years ago to the last ice age, but a later study in 2021 found that they were no older than 340 years.
Initially, researchers also thought the mare was wild. The same study showed it was actually a domestic horse.
Ancient wild horses lived in North America from 50 million to 10,000 years ago. They vanished around the same time that other large animals, including mammoths, dire wolves, and giant sloths, went extinct.
A combination of climate change and human interaction likely led to their demise at the end of the last ice age.
However, the 2021 study revealed that the horse was domestic and was about 12 years old when it died. It dates back to post-Columbian times after the Spanish brought the domestic horse to the Americas in the 16th century.
Many Indigenous people in the Americas quickly adopted these horses into their cultures. The Lehi mare was probably raised by Indigenous people who lived in what is currently Utah. It is possible that a member of the Ute or Shoshone communities cared for the horse.
“The Lehi horse shows us that there is an incredible archaeological record out there of the early relationship between Indigenous people and horses—a record that tells us things not written in any European histories,” said William Taylor, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder and a curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
After the horse died, its owners buried its remains in a pit surrounded by lake sediments that date back 14,000 to 16,000 years ago.
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