Where did horses come from and when did people use them?

The origin and usage of horses in human history

An article from 2019 speculated that horses were common in the pre-Columbian Americas and had a long-running special place in Native American culture. The article briefly made waves because most people learned in grade school that Europeans introduced horses to the “New World.” (Specifically, the Spanish, around 1600.) So if horses had been in the Americas all along, that would upend a small part of human history.

The article, however, was total nonsense. Not just because it was riddled with basic errors (such as claiming the Cerutti Mastodon site had “designs carved by human hands” despite no carvings at the site). The author behind the claim is a postmodernist grifter whose bloated PhD dissertation includes “deconstructing a Eurocentric myth” in the title. She’s an activist masquerading as an academic, and should be mocked instead of accepted.

Other people with more patience for absurdity have debunked her shoddy work. She started with a conclusion instead of a hypothesis, grasping at straws for anything that would corroborate her “Europeans are racist and Natives are magically wonderful” claim. She even links to studies that contradict her claims. Looks like literally anyone can get a PhD these days. The author continues to speak on this topic despite having proven she’s unqualified to do so. Media outlets are happy to promote her, since she *seems* authoritative and agrees with anti-Western bias. Thus the “horse topic” rears its head every couple of years.

This saga did get me thinking: Where did horses originally come from? How did they spread out across the world and become adopted? They were more or less essential for early humans to not just survive, but thrive.