A new study shows that horses were being used in the American West earlier than was previously documented thanks to findings by a University of Wyoming student. In 2021, Cassidee Thornhill, a graduate student from the University of Wyoming, provided analysis of the remains of a 17th century animal found near Flaming Gorge Reservoir. The remains were a young horse of just 6 months old but the bones showed clear signs of modifications by humans. Thornhill’s radiocarbon dating concluded that the horse lived around the year 1640 but it had been believed that horses hadn’t arrived in that region until around the year 1700. Thornhill’s paper suggested that most likely the Shoshone in the region at that time obtained the horses by the 1640s via the Ute people. Her research was originally published in 2021 in the ‘Plains Anthropologist’ journal and is now being cited in the journal ‘Science’.
