On the Native American Horse and its survival in Patagonia

In his paper El Grupo Lingüistico Tshon de los territorios magallánicos, Robert LEhmann-Nitsche mentions the name of the Tehuelche natives, and offers different explanations. One is the following, and it involves the pre-Hispanic horse, native to the Américas. (Revista del Museo de La Plata, vol.22, 1913).

I have posted several times about extant native American horses, this is additional proof. Below is the relevant text:

"[these] inducethe belief that tehuel may also be an animal, typical of Patagonia, but, which? The reasonings of Aníbal Cardoso³, in my point of view leave no doubt abouth the fact that the autochthonous Argentine horse (Equus rectidiens) has existed during the period of the conquest [by the Spaniards c.1536] and is still alive, though not with pureblood representatives (the last bands in Southern Patagonia must have disappeared during the past years), but crossbred with the imported horse, originating the creole horse. The native linguistics supports this ...
there is among the Araucanians [Mapuches] the native Word for a wild horse: caitá (this is, according to our investigations, the correct spelling), the word is not found in the old dictionaries, but is commented by Lenz¹.
...
It is on record that the Patagons of the South used the word shäch, to designate wild horse (Equus rectidiens), that was gradually replaced by the Spanish word caballo."

³ Cardoso, Antigüedad del Caballo en el Plata. Anales del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Buenos Aires. XII, p.271-439. 1912. Nuevos comprobantes a propóito e la antigüedad del caballo en el Plata, ibidiem, XXIV, p. 445-460. 1913.
¹ Lenz, Los elementos indios del castellano de Chile. Santiago de Chile, 1904, p.160.

Below is a picture (Source) of a Tehuelche native, wrapped in his guanaco fur quillango mounting a rather small horse which, seems to have curly hair!!

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Prehispanic Horses in Patagonia (update)

The established consensus is that the Spaniards reintroduced the domestic horses into North and South America following the discovery by Columbus in 1492. In Southern South America, the first horses on record were those left behind by Pedro de Mendoza's failed first founding of Buenos Aires (1536-1541). A few mares and stallions were left behind (why?) and they roamed free on the Pampas breeding at an astounding rate, wild horses soon populated the vast prairies of Central Argentina. The Indians adopted them and they were taken into Patagonia.

With this in mind, a paper published in 2023 (William Timothy Treal Taylor et al. (2023), Interdisciplinary evidence for early domestic horse exploitation in southern Patagonia. Sci.adv.9,eadk5201(2023).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adk5201). describes the remains of horses found in Patagonia.

The site is located in the south of Santa Cruz province, between Gallegos and Coig Rivers. The remains were dated and this is what the paper states:

" Two of these horse specimens produced dates from the early 18th to mid-20th centuries. More sensitive radiocarbon discrimination between samples from this period is typically impossible due to a plateau in the calibration curve. However, one specimen, a right tibia fragment, confidently predates 1800 CE (ca. 1645–1808 cal. CE, 2 sigma calibrated range, AA114998), while a second, from the tooth row, appears to likely predate 1700 CE (ca. 1515–1800 cal. CE, AA115001). A guanaco bone shaft fragment was also successfully dated to ca. 1522–1800 cal. CE (2 sigma calibrated range, AA115000), and carbonized food residue from a single ceramic sherd was dated to a similar range (ca. 1645–1800 cal. CE, 2 sigma, UCIAMS-280680). When analyzing horse occupation at the site as a Bayesian uniform phase model in OxCal (https://c14.arch.ox.ac.uk/oxcal/OxCal.html) and assuming the date of 1536 (start of the Mendoza expedition) as the earliest possibility date of horse introduction, the posterior modeled probability distribution for the adoption of horses at Chorrillo Grande 1 has a median modeled start date of ca. 1617 cal. CE, with the most likely date for this adoption falling between 1540 and 1650 cal. CE (1 sigma). When all dates from the site, including guanaco and foodcrust dates, are also included, Bayesian uniform phase modeling produces an even narrower posterior distribution for the onset of site activity, with a median modeled start date of ca. 1627 cal. CE and the most likely boundary falling between 1599 and 1653 cal. CE (1 sigma)."

So the dating is based on the assumption that horses were introduced by Mendoza in 1536! But, what if there had been horses, the native American horses, that had survived the megafaunal extinction in Patagonia? Wouldn't these horses mean that the 1536 AD is not valid?

The genetic analysis found that these were specimens of Domestic horse (Equus caballus), but that is what the Megafaunal American horses were. They were genetically identical to modern horses. So this finding does not clarify the origin of these Patagonian horses.

The lower boundary set at 1536 AD. See Supplementary materials

The script used to date the samples (OxCal Analysis) had a Boundary set at 1536 AD (read more here) which establishes a lower boundary meaning that the samples will be dated to a later date than this lower boundary!!

This is like reconfirming a previously established axiomatic assumption. We decide that horses were brought to America after 1536 so all horse remains found will be dated after that date. Bad science!

Even so, the Confidence Interval includes dates prior to 1536 as possible.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

Curly-Haired Horses revisited

Back in 2019, I mentioned this type of horse (see post). I have found more information while updating my book for its 2nd edition, and decided to improve my original post.

One unusual trait found in American horses is curly hair. This is extremely odd, and it has only been reported in some isolated regions of Asia and the Americas, but not in Europe. This suggests that it wasn’t introduced into America by the Spanish horses.

Perhaps it originated here among the indigenous American horses?

Felix Manuel de Azara, in his The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the River La Plata, described a curly-haired horse found in Paraguay, South America:

"I have seen many crisp-haired horses, called in Paraguay Pichaí; their hair is curly, like that of the Negros of Guinea and their hoof as narrow as that of Spanish mules, in which they differ from the common run of horses. I have seen them in various colors, but not piebald or white.

He used the native Guaraní word Pichaí, which means “curly.” Curly-haired horses are not very common, and Azara added that “as they are very ugly, attempts have been made to exterminate them by castration, and even by killing the mares,” so it isn’t surprising that there were not many reports of curly-haired horses in historic records.

Charles Darwin, who was interested in natural oddities, wrote in 1860, that they were only found in three places: Paraguay, mentioning Azara’s text, Russia (“A Russian breed of horses is said to have curled hair”), and the US (“Dr. Canfield informs me that a breed with curly hair was formed by selection at Los Angeles in North America.”).

The curly-haired horse from Russia (actually, from Tajikistan) is known as Lokai. The International Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds, by Bonnie L. Hendricks, mentions that: “This breed was developed by the Uzbek Lokai tribe in the sixteenth century.”

Regarding the Los Angeles variety, there is a printed reference to a “curly horse” in California in 1849. It was captured by Col. Fremont. The article states it had the “general appearance of the horse, with the shaggy hide of the buffalo, and a tail without hair.” The author discussed it with an experienced Mexican rancher from Zacatecas who confirmed that it was a very rare horse, “occasionally seen among the numerous herds of Mexico,”51 where they were known as “Caballos chinos, or curly-haired horses.”

Interestingly, the Mexican word “chino” doesn’t mean “Chinese” as in regular Spanish: it has a pre-Hispanic origin. It comes from a Native American Tewa word Tsini (in Spanish it is pronounced “chini”), these people lived in New Mexico. So, here is a Native American word used to refer to curly animals applied to a curly horse. A positive proof of its ancient indigenous roots.

The current American curly horse breed originated in Eureka, Nevada, when a rancher named John Damele captured a wild colt with curly hair in the early 1900s.

But these curly horses go back even further, to the days before the Europeans arrived in America. A statement by Claire Henderson published in 1991, tells that the Dakota/Lakota native people firmly believe that the aboriginal North American horse did not become extinct after the last Ice Age, and that it was part of their pre-contact culture:

"According to Elders, the aboriginal pony had the following characteristics: It was small, about 13 hands, it had a 'strait' back necessitating a different saddle from that used on European horses, wider nostrils, larger lungs so that its endurance was proverbial. One breed had a long mane, and shaggy (curly) hair, while another had a 'singed mane'."

Argentine Curly-haired Horses

The curly horse was rare but not unknown in the Pampas region of Argentina: It is mentioned by Ricardo Hogg in 1941, who wrote that “the curly haired horse, variety almost extinct nowadays.”

An interesting article published in May 2025 in National Geographic reports that an Argentine veterinarian, Gerardo Rodriguez noticed a stranged horse in the Somuncurá plateau, in Rio Negro province, Patagonia. It had curly hair. A gaucho (name for the Argentine cowboy) told him that these animals were far more "common before the droughts, volcanic eruptions and other factors wiped them out." He bought the horse and, with his wife Andrea Sede worked with this animal and over twenty years later they have built their herd of curly-haired horses, the only one in South America.

They took samples and had their DNA analyzed at the A&M University in Texas, US, which found that they were different from all other curly-haired horses. They have a unique mutation, that is not found anywhere else in the world.

Argentine Curly-haired horse. Credits

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall © 

On horses in the Pampas: the name "Bagual" for wild horses

In 1802 Felix de Azara wrote about the origin of the wild horses of the Pampas prairies of South America:

When Buenos Aires (founded in 1536) was abandoned in 1541 and its few residents moved by ship to Asunción in Paraguay "they were unable to carry along with them all the horses they had brought from Andalusia; so that five mares and seven horses were left behind on the plain".

What sources he used are unknown, contemporary chroniclers didn't report this event, furthermore, the residents almost starved to death and resorted to cannibalism so why would they have left the 12 horses alive instead of eating them?

Azara continues:

The multiplication is quite extraordinary, a mare has a pregnancy of 11 months, and mares come into heat about a week after foaling, so this would mean one birth per year per mare over their breeding lifespan (from their first or second year till their mid twenties) she would in theory produce 12 males and 12 females before dying. These young mares would do the same and so on.

Between 1541 and 1580 when Buenos Aires was founded again, those 12 horses would have become....not more than 105,614 horses based on acutal growth rate values for feral horse populations (Growth Rates of Feral Horse Populations, Robert A. Garrott, Donald B. Siniff and L. Lee Eberhardt, The Journal of Wildlife Management Vol. 55, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 641-648. doi: 10.2307/3809513).

The formula is: N_t+1 = N_t x λ, where λ is the "finite population growth rate", N_t is the population on year "t", and N_t+1 is the population the following year. The values of λ according to Garrott et al., range from 1.15 to 1.27 with an average value of 1.21, so the horse population in the Pampas would have grown from 12 horses to 2,430 (λ = 1.15), 16,789 (λ = 1.21) or in the best case 105,614 (λ = 1.15) horses.

Azara asserts that the local Pampas or Querandí natives called these wild horses "bagualada" or "baguales".

Where did the name "Bagual" come from?

Some have said it was the deformation of the Spanish word "Caballo" (horse) transformed into "bagual" (from the Native Mapuche word "Cawellu"), I doubt it.

The word Bagual was used by the Querandí people though the meaning is unknown.

In the mid 1620s, a native Querandí tribe, with 223 members lived in a "Reducción" or native village called San José. It was headed by chief Juan Bagual (ca.1560 - 1642) who adopted the name Juan -John- when he was baptized. They lived in horse hide tents, had a few horses which they captured from the wild horses that roamed the Pampas. The village was located on the Areco River, 18 leagues (57 mi. or 90 km) from Buenos Aires.

They been "encomendado" (a type of serfdom) to Cristoval Altamirano in 1582 shortly after Buenos Aires had been founded for a second time.

Bagual was unruly, he rose several times against the Spaniards, escaped from the encomienda, was sent to the "Reducción", deserted it for the open countryside during the measles epidemics, laid siege to the then infant city of Buenos Aires, and was defeated time and time again by the Spaniards.

He and his tribe were repeatedly "reducidos" (Spanish for subdued) and confined to a certain area under the supervision of a Spanish overlord known as a "Reducción.

These people of Bagual's tribe were good horse riders. They are specifically mentioned as folows; they "ride on some skins and use sticks as stirrups and some use bridles".

So it is quite clear that Bagual was a native name, like that of his fellow chief Tubichaminí

The name has also been written by his contemporaries as "Vagual" (the latter name is from this source - pp 26) and "Mbagual" -the addition of the "M" in front of his name was probably due to the influence of the Native Guaraní language (see source), which uses the "Mb" phoneme, though it is usually preceded with a vowel.

He is also said to have been called "Miniti" of unknown meaning.

s he escaped time and time again, and sought freedom, the story goes, the wild horses of the Pampas were named after this indomitable native chief. A nice tale, but very probably not true.

The Araucano and Mapuche who later replaced the Pampa - Querandi people on the prairies, didn't use the word "Bagual" for wild horses, they used "Caitá" (Viaje al Pais de los Araucanos, E. Zevallos, 1881).

The word, according to Augusta's Araucano - Spanish dictionary is actually: kaita, an adjective that means "wild".

So these are the facts:

1. The Querandí people who lived in what is now the northeastern part of Buenos Aires province, had a chief who lived in the late 1500s and early 1600s who was called "Bagual" (Vagual or Mbagual). Little is known about the Querandí, they became extinct shortly after the mid 1600s due to disease.
2. The word for wild horses in Southern south America (Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina) is "Bagual" it was used by Spaniards, Portuguese and natives alike
3. The Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina had another word for wild horses: "kaita" or "caita", meaning "wild".

Native people such as the Mapuche used animal names as part of their clan or personal names: Nahuel (jaguar), Pangue (puma), Manke (condor), so perhaps the Querandí did the same and "Bagual" was the name of an animal of the Pampa plains, such as a horse, a native horse, indigenous to America.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Siberian or Indigenous Horses in America: Curly "chino horse" in California

According to the International Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds (by Bonnie L. Hendricks page 68), the Bashkir horses are not curly: "Mane and tail hair is thick and grows quite long in winter", no refrence to curls. They were bred from steppe horses of western Asia and ancient skeletons have been recovered from tombs spanning the area from the Volga River to Krasnodar (the area between the Black and Caspian seas north of Georgia).

So the "American Bashkir Curly" horse which has curly hair is surely unrelated to these Russian horses.

The The Official Horse Breeds Standards Guide: The Complete Guide to the Standards of All North American Equine Breed Associations, by Fran Lynghaug states that when the horse was registered in the US as a breed, "it was initially believed that the Russian Bashkir horse was curly coated; thus it probably was an ancestor of the American Curly... after the fact, it was discovered that it wasn't the Bashkir Russian horse that had a curly coat. It was actually the Lokai [from] Tajikistan"

We mentioned the Lokai Horses in one of our posts, a few days ago.

So, Baskirs are not curly, and have no relation to the American curly hair horses. Lokai, from Asia, are curly, so the question is: Did Lokai horses somehow reach America?

Siberian horses in America?

A paper by Ovchinnikov IV, et al. (2018) (Genetic diversity and origin of the feral horses in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. PLoS ONE 13(8): e0200795. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200795) analyzed the DNA (autosomal and mtDNA) of feral horses that live in the North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP), US. By comparing hair samples from 196 of those wild horses, they found some interesting things:

• The horses carried L and B mtDNA haplotypes.
• "Two complete mtDNA sequences of haplogroup L were closely related to the mtDNA of American Paint horse" which implies admixture with European horses brought to the New World by Spaniards and whose pinto color was favored by the Native Americans.
• Their haplotype B did not have close matches in the genetic records: "The closest mtDNA sequence is carried by a Thoroughbred racing horse from China... Other closely related sequences to the horse were obtained from the unspecified Italian breed horse, the Yunnan horse from China, and the Yakutia horse ) from central Siberia, Russia".

The authors conjecture about the origin of these Asian genes: "raising a possibility of historical transportation of horses from Siberia and East Asia to North America."

I would also add the possibility of a population of ancient horses spanning both Asia and North America where the American horses never became extinct and therefore share genes with their Asian relatives, and mixed with later European horses brought across the Atlantic by the colonizers and conquerors of America (Spaniards, French and British).

The most interesting finding was that the Autosomal analysis placed these TRNP horses on a branch of their own, making them "distinctly different from 48 major horse breeds.", see this tree below:

B and L halpogroups split some 90 Kya, and the average age of B haplo is 30,000 years, and B haplogroup is very frequent in North America:

"haplogroup B seems to be most frequent in North America (23.1%), with lower frequencies in South America (12.68%) and the Middle East (10.94%) and Europe (9.38%). Although the frequency of this lineage is low (1.7%) in the Asian sample of 587 horses, this lineage was found in the Bronze Age horses from China and South Siberia"

The age (30 Kya) and the fact that their frequency is highest in the America seems to suggest an American origin. However it could also imply a bottleneck where B halplo horses brought from Europe becam more prevalent in the Americas.

The problem with horses is that they were domesticated some 5,000 years ago and since then, selective pressure caused by humans has altered the original genetics of horses. Wild horses have died out, but for millennia they admixed with domesticated horses. Current "wild horses" carry a strong content of domesticated breeds' genes.

This was confirmed by C. Gaunitz et al., (Science 10.1126/science.aao3297 (2018). Ancient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalski's horses), who recently found that "Przewalski's horses art the feral descendants of horses herded at Botai and not truly wild horses".

But lets return to the Asian horses in America.

If the curly horses reached America from Asia, the only route seems to be Russian horses taken to their Alaskan outposts during the 1700s and 1800s.

Did they export horses to Alaska?

We have photos of wild horses on an Aleutian Island, descendants of horses left by the Russians (Smithsonian magazine).

Bonnie Hendricks (Read full text believes that Russians would have brought the "hardy" Yakut horse and not the Lokai horse to Alaska. She also says that there were only 16 horses in what is now Alaska back in 1817. So the notion that these horses somehow escaped and trotted all the way to Nevada and lived there in the wild until they were discovered and became the American Curlies, is very improbable.

An American origin?

I have already mentioned that Charles Darwin wrote about the curly haired horses, quoting Azara on the Paraguayan curly "Pichaí" and referring to a Russian breed (Lokai?) and more interestingly, to correspondence with a "Dr. Canfield informs me that a breed with curly hair was formed by selection at Los Angeles in North America."

Below is this letter written by Dr. Colbert A. Canfield to Darwin on August 5, 1871 (read it in full here):

"The wild horses of Western N. America are mostly dun-colored of various shades from yellow to brown; roans of various shades,-gray-roan, iron-gray-roan, red-roan, strawberry-roan, &c.; and gray changing, as the horse grows older, to white. Most of the yellow, dun-colored & light-brown and some of the grays have the spinal, shoulder & leg-stripes of a darker color. The same is true of the mules bred among them. There was a race of "curly horses", or horses with the hair short & curled; that had been produced intentionally by selection for that purpose, on a ranch near Los Angeles.
In 1853 there were in that band or Caballada several hundred curly-haired horses."

Very interesting, it mentions a herd of "curly horses", a "caballada" (Spanish word for a herd or team of horses) which had been "intentionally" produced by selection.

The letter discloses tht Canfield was a rancher who had horses, interacted with wild mustangs (he lived in Monterey, California). So he had an in depth knowledge about these creatures.

The point is: were these horses -the original stock of the curly breed- native to America, wild horses captured and bred selectively or, on the other hand, European, and being found in California, Spanish horses?

In 1869 (The resources of California... by J. Hittell, 1869 page 222-4) there were 150,000 horses in California, one-third wild Spanish, one-third tame Spanish and the final third, American. So it was from the 50,000 wild horses that the curlies came from.

There is a reference to a "curly horse" in California American Agriculturist, Volume 8 printed in 1849:

So it had a "general appearance of the horse, with the shaggy hide of the buffalo, and a tail without hair", which according to a Mexican from Zacatecas is a very rare horse, "occasionally seen among the numerous herds of Mexico", where they were known as "Caballos chinos, or curly-haired horses".

As an Argentine Spanish speaker, the word "chino" to me, means "Chinese" (from China), however in Mexico the word "chino" means "Curly" (Vocabulario de mexicanismos Comprobado con ejemplos y comparado con los de otros paises hispanoamericanos by Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, 1899). Why Chinese? after all, Chinese have straight, lank hair, not curly hair! The official Spanish Language dictionary of the Real Academia Española does not record this Mexican variant.

The origin of this word is Pre-Hispanic, it comes from a Native American Tewa word "Tsini" (in Spanish pronounced "chini"), these people lived in New Mexico. Below you can read the text from "Ethnozoology of the Tewa Indians. pp 28 Junius Henderson, John Peabody Harrington:

So here is a Native American word used to refer to curly animals applied to a curly horse. Perhaps a clue to its American origin.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Curly haired Tarpan horses in Poland

Tarpan is a Tartar name meaning "wild horse", and was applied in 1780 by Pallas to describe wild horses that roamed the Eastern European steppes.

It was later used to designate the European wild horses (Equus ferus ferus) whose remains have been found in post-glacial sediments from the Holocene.

Their range surely extended east beyond Europe into Asia and primitive wild horses (i.e. Riwoch's horse of Tibet) found there may be related to them.

The Tarpans became extinct in 1879. They had been hunted down and killed by the farmers who were fed up with the stallions stealing their domesticated mares and also, that these herds ate their crops.

Modern "Tarpans" derive from wild horses captured in Bialowieza Forest, in Eastern Poland, in the 1780s. These were taken to the game park of Count Zamojki and, after it closed down in 1812, the horses were given to local peasants in Bilgoraj. Eventually these horses bred with others but retained part of the Tarpan genome.

Professor Tadeusz Vetulani (1897-1952) worked with these horses in the 1920s and "recreated" the Tarpan lineage, now known as Konik.

Below are two texts from the book The Natural History of Horses: The Equidae Or Genus Equus, by Charles Hamilton Smith, Conrad Gesner published in 1841. It describes the "curly haired" horse with "narrow hoofs" which is exactly what Azara described in Paraguay, South America, in 1802: the curly haired Pichaí, with narrow asnine-like hoofs and curly hair: (I have underlined the text in red)

These wild horses are surely the ones mentioned by Darwin (see my previous post) when he stated that there were curly haired horses in Russia. In fact this forest is now in Poland, but during most of the XIXth century, it was part of Belostok Oblast, a province of the Russian Empire.

Finally, some images of Tarpans, the first is "The tarpan wild horse", from Sir William Jardine The naturalist's Library 1840s. The photograph is from a page on the recreator of Tarpans, and seems to depict a Tarpan from the early 1900s.

Of course modern Tarpans have mixed with domesticated horses for thousands of years, so they are not the "original" wild pre-domestication horse that roamed the steppes from Poland to Siberia. But they do retain some of the characteristics of these primigenious wild horses.

What is the link between Tarpans and American Bashkir Curlies (now -after dropping the Bashkir part of the name- known as American Curlies)? Also, what are Bashkir's anyway? Are these "Russian" horses linked to the American ones?

That will be the subject of our next post. To be continued...

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Curly Haired Horses: indigenous to America?

Yesterday's post dealt with horses and mentioned the peculiar gait of some of them, specially the Latin American ones. Today's post looks into curly haired horses.

They are interesting because they have been reported in Asia and in America, but not in Europe. If the mutation that causes it survived in America and did not reach the New World carried by Spanish or European horses, then it means that it survived here in indigenous American horses.

In Paraguay 1800 AD

Felix Manuel de Azara (1742 - 1821) was a Spanish military officer who was stationed in Southern South America from 1771 to 1801. During this period he studied the local natural history and later wrote several books. In onte of them (The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the River La Plata, Volume 1 pp 42 he described a curly haired horse found in Paraguay, South America:

"I have seen many crisp-haired horses, called in Paraguay Pichaí; their hair is curly, like that of the Negros of Guinea and their hoof as narrow as that of Spanish mules, in which they differ from the common run of horses. I have seen them in various colors, but not piebald nor white".

Note: Piebald are horses whose coat has large black and white patches, and the native Guaraní word "Pichaí" means "curly".

Curly haired horses are not very common and Azara wrote that "...as they are very ugly, attempts have been made to exterminate them by castration, and even by killing the mares", so it isn't surprising that there were not many records of curly haired horses in historic records.

I have not been able to find refrences about them in Spanish or Latin American chronicles during this period, and the only historic reference comes from China, 1,200 years before Azara saw these horses in Paraguay.

In China 600 AD

Li Shimin was the second Emperor of the Tang dynasty, and ruled China as Emperor Taizong of Tang from 626 to 649 AD. He was very fond of his war horses and had his tomb (the Zhaoling Mausoleum) decorated with stone reliefs of them. One of these steeds was Quanmaogua, which is Chinese for "Curly hair horse".

It had a wavy saffron-yellow coat, the relief shows him with nine arrows sticking out of his body, yet he has an arrogant and wound defying attitude. Can you make out the curls in the stone sculpture?

Quanmaogua curly horse China 600 AD. www.penn.museum

Asian and North American curly hair horses

Darwin wrote about these horses in 1860, and mentioned three distinct locations where they could be found (Paraguay, mentioning Azara's text), Russia ("A Russian breed of horses is said to have curled hair" and the US ("Dr. Canfield informs me that a breed with curly hair was formed by selection at Los Angeles in North America.")

Let's look into both geographical locations:

Russia

The curly haired horse from Russia (actually, from Tajikistan) is known as Lokai. The International Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds, by Bonnie L. Hendricks, mentions the Lokai horse as follows:

"This breed was developed by the Uzbek Lokai tribe in the sixteenth century... the surface hairs of the coat are characteristically curly", but it does not seem to have always been so, the breed is recent, but based on wild ponies:

"in the Lokai breed the foundation sire of the curly-coated strain was a golden sorrel named Farfor, found in 1959 in the Kolchoz Lamanov in the Parchar Region... curly fromt the ears to the hooves, with tight curls like a Karakul lamb."

These horses even exhibit Appaloosa color markings according to James Blakely (Horses and Horse Sense: The Practical Science of Horse Husbandry)

America

The American curly haired horse could be related to these Lokai horses: Eduard De Steiguer in Wild Horses of the West: History and Politics of America's Mustangs is categoric: "Mustangs in Nevada's Fish Creek HMA wear the unusual wavy-haired coat of the Lokai Curly, a breed brought from Russia and released on the range by an American horse fancier in 1874". There is no source quoted for this statement. But we do know (Darwin) that someone had bred the curly hair horses in Los Angeles in the 1850s-60s.

However there is an older date mentioning curly haired horses in North America, and this comes from the Lakota people. Pictographs of the North American Indians, by Garrick Mallery mentions the Lakota winter counts. Their year spanned the period between two winters and they drew images on hides as a record of each year: one image per year, recording the most memorable event. The story behind it was then passed on by oral tradition.

The 1803-04 winter count was known as the one where "Blackfeet steals many curly horses from the Assinaboines..." or, according to another native, White-Cow-Killer: "Plenty-wooly-horses winter."

The Lakota were also known as the Teton Sioux, and they lived in the upper Mississippi Region (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas) and later moved by war into the Great Plains. We have depictions of these horses drawn in 1880-81 (Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers Black Hawk's Vision of the Lakota World, Indian Pictures drawn by Black Hawk Chief Medicine Man of the Sioux, by Janet Catherine Berlo:

There is an interesting written document (The Aboriginal North American Horse, Statement of Claire Henderson, History Dept. Batiment de Koninck, Laval University, Quebec, Canada. Feb. 1991), which I will quote below:

"Dakota⁄Lakota people have an extensive "horse vocabulary," and they distinguish between their "own" horses, which among other names they call "sunkdudan," the small legged horse, and the European imported horse which they call the long-legged horse, orthe American Horse.
...
this writer [C. Henderson] used LaVerendrie's maps and diaries, as well as other documentation and interviewed numerous Elders and old ranchers. Eventually the site was located in Wyoming, and all of the people he met and traveled with were found to be Lakotas. But these interviews also lead to a wealth of information about the Indian pony.
According to Elders, the aboriginal pony had the following characteristics: It was small, about 13 hands, it had a "strait" back necessitating a different saddle from that used on European horses, wider nostrils, larger lungs so that its endurance was proverbial. One breed had a long mane, and shaggy (curly) hair, while another had a "singed mane."

So here we have it, one of the Lakota's local (not European) horse breeds had curly hair.

Does this mean that these were indigenous horses? Horses that did not become extinct in America?

Recent horse remains found in the Americas

There is extensive evidence of Prehistoric horses, but most of these remains date back to the end of the last Ice Age, and then American horses seem to have disappeared. Their Eurasian counterparts survived, American ones died out. But is this the case?

A paper published in 2016 (Difusion temprana del caballo en territorio de la Actual Republica Oriental del Uruguay, Bracco D, Bracco R, Fariña R. Temas Americanistas No. 37, p 67-87 Dec. 2016) tells of a domestic horse dated to 1465 - 1635 and 1350 - 1630 AD by C14 and OSL methods. Which is on the fringe of the arrival of Spaniards to the region (after 1516, and with horses after 1536).

More horse remains have been discovered in Carlsbad California, US, where a ritual burial "took place sometime between 1625 and 1705. So these horses died at least 50 years before San Diego Mission de Alcala, the first of the California missions, was founded in 1769.", of course these could have been stray beasts that ran away from the Spanish settlements in New Mexico or even Mexico, colonized after 1520.

American horses would be indistinguishable from European ones and their mtDNA (image is from Cheek tooth morphology and ancient mitochondrial DNA of late Pleistocene horses from the western interior of North America: Implications for the taxonomy of North American Late Pleistocene Equus, Barrón-Ortiz CI, Rodrigues AT, Theodor JM, Kooyman BP, Yang DY, Speller CF (2017) . PLoS ONE 12(8): e0183045. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183045) show how Prehispanic Argentine horses -blue arrows- mix with those from the Urals and modern domesticated horses from Europe:

What causes curly hair?

There are two mutations that cause wavy hair in horses (An epistatic effect of KRT25 on SP6 is involved in curly coat in horses, Annika Thomer, Maren Gottschalk, Anna Christmann, Fanny Naccache, Klaus Jung, Marion Hewicker-Trautwein, Ottmar Distl & Julia Metzger Scientific Reports volume 8, Article number: 6374 (2018) Published: 23 April 2018):

"we identified two missense variants in KRT25 and SP6 acting independently on the development of a curly coat... Hair fibers from both mutant SP6 or mutant KRT25 horses showed typical curly hair characteristics like a polymorphic shape, restricted medulla and rotated shafts with depressions. These findings, which were also identified in human, rat, mice and cattle curl types, were postulated to be essential properties of curly hair"

And these were found only in American horses, another paper The Genetics of Curly coated horses by Wilkinson M., says: "Two SNP mutations located within the 11th equine chromosome, KRT25 and SP6, have shown to be the causative mutations in two types of North American curly coated horses. The two mutations were not found as causative mutations in equine populations in Asia, South America, and some additional equine populations in North America. This suggests that there are many more causative mutations yet to be isolated."

If this is true, then the story of the Russian horses introduced into Nevada in 1874 would not be possible because they'd have the Asian mutation and not the one found in America.

Patagonia

An online article states that "There are curly coated horses in Argentina. In the wild horse herds of Patagonia, a percentage of the horses have curly coats. Hair samples have been obtained from several of these horses and they do not have the KRT25 mutation. Whether they have one of the undiscovered mutations mentioned in North American curly coated horses will be determined after isolation of other curly genes"

It ads that "In 2013, Andrea and Gerardo Rodriquez contacted Angie Gaines through the Curly Mustang Association Facebook page. The couple stated that they were raising curly coated horses that had been captured from the wild horse herds of Patagonia, Argentina. Their ranch was close to a remote village named Maquinchao" (in Rio Negro province, in the Patagonian steppe) "Hair follicle samples were sent from Argentina to Gus Cothran's lab in Texas. The samples proved not to have the KRT25 mutation". This ranch is the "Yeguada Rodriguez" ranch, but I have found more information on Yeguada Rodriguez which states in Spanish the following (translated by me to English): "Yeguada Rodríguez is the only breeder of Curly American Bashkir in South America... Currently there are just over 4000 bashkir in the world, mainly in the US, and the only one in South America with registered DNA is in Maquinchao." The picture below is from their website:

If they are American Curly Bashkir then they can't be "wild horse herds of Patagonia".

I have tried to find references about curly "bagual" (feral horses in Patagonia) a word derived from the native Mapuche word "Cahual" which in turn comes from the Spanish word for horse (Caballo).

Nobody seems to have written about curly Patagonia bagual horses. But I did find a refrence (Los aborigenes del pais de cuyo, Cap. I PP Cabrera). It describes several people who having been captured by the natives managed to escape and reach the Spanish settlements in Southern Cuyo region in what is now Argentina (Mendoza province), just north of Patagonia.

These events took place in 1658. One of these men remembered a "Corregidor" or Mayor appointed by the King, from Chillán in Chile, who had a "curly horse" (caballo crespo), though he couldn't remember the man's name.

Nowadays there are long-tangled haired ponies in Chiloe (see this photo of a Chilote horse, which in the comments is called a "Chascón", word used in Peru and Chile to name a "curly horse"). This Chilote horse is (source) located on the same branch of the phylogenetic tree that holds all of the gaited Latin American horses mentioned in our previous post).

The curly horse was not unknown in the Pampas region of Argentina: It is mentioned by Ricardo Hogg ( Sobre vacas ñatas y otros temas camperos in La Prensa No.26.176 Nov 9, 1941 Secc. 2, 4e):

"... the curly haired horse, variety almost extinct nowadays".

I will try to find out more on Curly Haired horses in Patagonia.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2014 by Austin Whittall © 

Extant Prehispanic Patagonian horses (part IV)

I am updating this thread, which had 3 parts, and which I wrote back in 2013. (part 1, part 2, part 3).

I stumbled across a very interesting blog post [by Maju in his blog "For what they were… we are": Horse genetics (autosomal DNA)] which mentions the following paper: Genetic Diversity in the Modern Horse Illustrated from Genome-Wide SNP Data, Jessica L. Petersen et al, Published: January 30, 2013 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0054997.

The Parsimony tree from this paper is pictured below (from the paper and with Maju's comments):

As you can see the branches closest to the root of the tree are the Latin American breeds from Puerto Rico, Peru and Brazil, followed by the Iberian breeds.

Maju's comment was revealing: "Ignoring by the moment the Latin American breeds, which stem directly from the root of the tree, the oldest division is between the Iberian breeds (Lusitano, Andalusian) and all others, which in turn split in two groups, both scattered in Europe and Asia (different parts of Asia however). This would seem to confirm the dual origins theory.
However there are two more elements to consider: on one side the Northern Iberian breeds (apparently even older than the Southern ones, per Warmuth 2011) are not being considered here.
The other element to ponder is the most strange position of the three Latin American breeds. As there were no horses in America at the arrival of Europeans, the origins of such anomaly must be in the Old World, meaning probably that these breeds retain genetics of even older populations. These could be the already mentioned Northern Iberian breeds but they are said to have some admixture from Berber horses (or Barb) as well and this population (argued to be very old) has not been subject to any genetic study as of now."

The point is that these Latin American breeds appear to be even closer to the asnine root than their alleged Iberian forebearers, that is, they are even "older" than the European breeds that are their ancestors. How come?

A recent paper by Ludovico Orlando et al., (Tracking Five Millennia of Horse Management with Extensive Ancient Genome Time Series Cell, vol 177:6 P1419-1435.E31, May 30, 2019 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.03.049) also noticed that there was a very basal Iberian breed, now extinct in the lineage of modern horses:

"We find that two extinct horse lineages existed during early domestication, one at the far western (Iberia) and the other at the far eastern range (Siberia) of Eurasia. None of these contributed significantly to modern diversity."

Below is a tree from Ludovico Orlando's paper. The pink branch at the top is the "ancient" Iberian lineage, followed by the Siberian one in pale blue:

However Orlando's paper does not have the DNA of American horses -logically because his team was studying domesticated horses, and that happened in Eurasia not America.

Could local "native" American horses, of the original American equine stock have mixed with later evolved Iberian horses brought by Portuguese and Spaniards to the Americas?

This would explain their position as more ancestral in the tree.

The interesting point is the "gait" gene. The Spanish and Latin American horses have a special gait.

Horses have gaits, they trot, gallop, canter and walk. But some breeds have another natural gait that is very peculiar (The rider appears motionless in the saddle, and there is no perceptible up and down motion of the horse's back); watch this video with the gait of a Peruvian Paso Fino horse (yes, it is one of those mentioned further up as a Latin American breed).

The Peruvian Paso Fino is one of many gaited horses. This is due to the DMRT3 "gait" gene, which (see source): "...must have diverged from a common ancestral sequence within the last 10,000 years. Thus, the mutation occurred either just before domestication or more likely some time after domestication and then spread across the world as a result of selection on locomotion traits".

Petersen's paper (mentioned further up) also noticed this: "It thus seems that the genetic variant associated with the gait phenotype arose well before the separation of breeds.", and notices that not only Iberian horses and Latin American ones are gaited, so are the Icelandic horses but these, "Instead of clustering with the other gaited breeds, the Icelandic clusters with the Shetland" suggesting a separate origin for this group, a branch that probably split from the original group carrying the mutation.

The gait trait is found all over the world -humans took their horses with them- in almost half the breeds tested and at "a frequency ranging from 1% to 100%" Worldwide frequency distribution of the 'Gait keeper' mutation in the DMRT3 gene, M. Promerova et al., Animal Genetics, vol 45:2 April 2014 P 274-282 DOI: 10.1111/age.12120). Some believe that it has been artificially selected for, by human domestication, as riders prefer this type of gait.

The ancient Asian Przewalski's horse does not carry this mutation, and although some suggest an English origin ca. 800 AD for the mutation, it was present in Spain over 2000 years ago because Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) wrote that horses from what is now Asturias in Northern Spain moved both legs on the same side alternately and did not trot.

In the Americas, apart from the Latin American horses mentioned above, the North American Indian's appaloosa breed also has a particular gate known as the "shuffle" (see appaloosa shuffle video). This horse is better known for its spotted coat, which was favored by the Natives.

A global distribution map of the DMRT3 mutation (from Promerova et al.)

As you can see no Southern South American (i.e. Caballo Criollo Argentino or Chileno) were sampled.

Considering that it originated at least 10 Kya, and is found in America and Eurasia, it is very possible that this mutation arose in the original American horse stock and spread across Eurasia. The Spanish horses brought to America by the conquistadors mixed with native horses that also carried the mutation hence Latin American horses with 100% levels of this gait gene.

---

Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall ©