Comment by Animats
12 days ago
Nothing to domesticate in that period. Horses were introduced to North America by the Cortez expedition of 1519.
The pedigrees of those horses are known. The Cortez expedition was launched by a government and the paperwork still exists. They were good Andalusians. So North American wild horses were descended from good lines of riding animals. They didn't start out feral.
Horses evolved in North America, and disappear from the fossil record along with other megafauna about 10,000 years ago.
Clovis people almost certainly interacted with horses, but likely as food.
Equines roamed North America for millions of years before Cortez and were extinct ~10k years ago, most likely by human hunting, together with the mammoth and other species.
"Multiple factors including hunting by early Natives, climate change, and disease are thought to have helped contribute to their demise. They disappeared around the same time as other large mammals like Wooly Mammoths."
https://web.archive.org/web/20140819083344/http://www.canadi...
The whole genus is supposed to have evolved in North America. Horses or very closely related species went extinct in NA somewhere between 6000-10000 BC and definitely existed alongside humans. It would not be at all surprising if human hunting contributed to their extinction.