A Horse Skeleton Found In A Utah Backyard Was Thought To Date Back To The Last Ice Age, But Newer Analysis Revealed The Mare Was Domestic, And Its Remains No Older Than 340 Years
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.
ashva – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual horse
Radiocarbon dating of the bones and clues from the horse’s DNA revealed that the mare lived more recently.
“Once we looked closer, we found other clues, including severe arthritis—and ultimately, genetic data helped us to confirm this idea,” Taylor said.
According to Taylor, it died sometime after 1680 but before European settlers moved into the Salt Lake region in the mid-19th century.
There were also fractures on the horse’s spine that indicated someone had ridden the horse frequently—either bareback or with a saddle pad.
The rider would have banged up and down on the horse’s lower back, causing fractures that are rarely seen in wild horses.
Even though the mare had injuries, people continued to care for the horse, possibly because they wanted to breed her with local stallions.
Additionally, an analysis of the isotopes in the mare’s tooth enamel demonstrated that it consumed water and vegetation in the Wasatch Front region of Utah, providing further evidence that the horse was raised and tended locally.
The study was published in the journal American Antiquity.
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