Patagonian people were riding horses long before Europeans arrived

The first Europeans to visit the southernmost tip of South America marveled at the people they met there. They were so tall, one version of the story goes, that Ferdinand Magellan’s 16th century crew dubbed them “Patagones,” from the Spanish for “big foot.” The name came to describe Patagonia, the southern tip of South America as well. Two hundred years after Magellan’s visit, a British sailor stranded in the region recorded a very different picture. The locals, probably Indigenous Tehuelche people, were no longer notable just for their size. They were now thundering across the Patagonian plains on horses, an animal that went extinct in the region thousands of years earlier. The reintroduction of the horse dramatically transformed Patagonian societies, and its impact there was more profound than perhaps anywhere else in South America. Now, researchers say they’ve figured out when the horses got there. A study published today in Science Advances finds that after the animals were released by a failed Spanish colony in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1000 kilometers to the north, Indigenous people in the region rapidly incorporated the newly introduced animal into their culture, expanding its range to the southernmost tip of South America within about a century. “That’s pretty quick,” says Peter Mitchell, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not part of the research. “We knew horses come in, we knew they spread, but we d...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research