From Newsgroup: talk.origins

I am watching a 2019 Nature series on Horses. The second episode wants
to make the horses interaction with man back to when our ancestors left Africa. They note the ancient stone carvings and cave paintings. They
want to make more out of it than food, but it is likely the case that
horses were the favored source of meat. They were the safest large ice
age mammal to hunt and kill. Herds could be trapped and killed. The
behavior nature of the horse was flight upon attack, while rhinos,
mammoths, buffalo, and auroch will often stand and fight back. You
could wound a horse and then follow it until it dropped. Horses would
not be domesticated until less than 10,000 years ago. In North America
they were eaten to extinction by the modern humans that migrated there.
My take was that they were the favored North American food source. We
have mass kill sites that were likely used over and over to kill the
herds of these animals. They were likely preferred to be herded over
cliffs and into kill traps. They were much less lethal than Mastodons
or buffalo. They went extinct when their habitat was expanding during
this interglacial period 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The horse had to
be reintroduced into North America.

My take as to why horses went extinct in the Americas while they
survived in Asia is due to the fact that the horse evolved for well over
half a million years of being hunted by ancient Homo, but they had no
such experience in America, and were too easily killed, so horses went
extinct when their populations should have been expanding with the
retreat of the glaciers.

Ron Okimoto

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