Distribution of Equus fossils in the Americas from the Quaternary, Paleobiology Database
The fossil record for horses in the Quaternary in the Americas, a very niche topic, has had particular interest to Latter-day Saints for well-known reasons. At the outset I should lay my cards on the table and state that I hold to a loose translation model of the Book of Mormon production and simply think that horses and maybe even at times the very 19th century Christian language and themes in the Book of Mormon come from that daylight between what was inscribed on the plates and how it came out of Joseph Smith’s mouth after he “studied it out in [his] mind.”
Still, the Pre-Columbian horses idea is intriguing, but I haven’t really seen much in way of a very systematic take on the chance of a false negative: what are the confidence intervals for species extinction in the fossil record? Obviously the farther back you go the broader they are, so this is a very particular niche within a niche. I won’t claim to resolve that question here, but I dove into the Paleaobiology Database to get a sense of the distribution across time and space for fossils from Equus during the Quaternary Era in the Americas.
Huge caveat, this is not my area and while I think my assumptions are valid given the detail given in the documentation, I might have something fundamentally wrong, so if somebody has more training in this area (actual training; not bro science from exmormon reddit) do fact check me.
The database has two relevant columns: max_ma and min_ma, which according to the codebook appears to be the confidence intervals for the maximum and minimum number of years ago the fossil could be from. I downloaded the data from the cases that are in the visual above, so I am missing some Alaskan fossils, but I don’t want to spend the time to figure out how to include and, while I know I’m going out on a limb here and while the Church has no position on the Book of Mormon locations, I’m assuming they aren’t in the Arctic.
I’ve posted the cross-tab results for the number of fossils found under different time estimates below. I’m assuming the clustering is from the commonly accepted stop and start time periods for the different fossil/geologic layers. I ran the number in thousands of years to make it more comprehensible.
A few observations:
- If I am interpreting this right (which, again, I might not be), it does look like there are 18 fossil finds whose confidence intervals include the time periods of the BoM civilizations.
- However, you can clearly see the die-off, since there is a huge cluster that is dated starting from 11,700 years ago.
- I am surprised at how big these intervals are (again, if I’m reading this right). Years ago I envisioned some kind of distribution where we have thousands of fossils every thousand years, and we can delineate when the extinction happened from a clear stratigraphic census. It’s true that we can kind of sort of do that, but again the picture is much fuzzier and is based on many fewer data points than I believed earlier.
| Date interval, thousands of years ago | # Equus fossils |
| 0-11.7 | 2 |
| 0-129 | 12 |
| 0-2580 | 4 |
| 11.7-129 | 199 |
| 11.7-2580 | 112 |
| 11.7-300 | 27 |
| 11.7-4700 | 1 |
| 129-1800 | 1 |
| 129-2580 | 1 |
| 129-774 | 35 |
| 14-1400 | 14 |
| 14-210 | 24 |
| 1800-2580 | 5 |
| 210-1400 | 256 |
| 210-4700 | 6 |
| 300-1700 | 2 |
| 774-1800 | 2 |
| 774-2580 | 12 |
| 774-3600 | 1 |
Stephen, “Date interval, thousands of years ago” is confusing me. What does it mean in the case of “129-2580,” for example?
In any case, interesting! Just like native oral histories of always having ridden horses are interesting. It’s not that any of this somehow proves the Book of Mormon is true, but that history is interesting, and dealing with historical uncertainty is interesting, and the Book of Mormon makes the history of the Americas doubly interesting.
“At the outset I should lay my cards on the table and state that I hold to a loose translation model of the Book of Mormon production and simply think that horses and maybe even at times the very 19th century Christian language and themes in the Book of Mormon come from that daylight between what was inscribed on the plates and how it came out of Joseph Smith’s mouth after he “studied it out in [his] mind.”
I have no idea what this means.
@Jonathan: So that would be 129,000 years ago to 2.6 million years ago.
@Rick: We don’t have a lot of details about the translation process (we sometimes think it was a simple matter of seeing the transliteration over the characters, but the fact that the plates weren’t even being looked at suggests that it sometimes wasn’t that simple), and JS didn’t feel it was necessary to provide them, but D&C upbraided Oliver Cowdery for “taking no thought save it were to ask me,” so we do know that the thoughts of the translators were involved somehow. From what little we know about the process I suspect there was a prayerful back-and-forth maybe starting with a feeling, confirmation about what that feeling meant, etc. He had gotten adept at this process so it became smooth but a lot of it was processed through JS’ mind, so maybe; for example, the very New Testament-y language about the atonement by Nephi was referring to some concept on the plates that was a rough OT analogue, but vectored through the concepts JS was aware of it became simply “atonement.” I like a BY quote on this that’s relevant:
“When God speaks to the people, he does it in a manner to suit their circumstances and capacities . . . I will even venture to say that if the Book of Mormon were now to be rewritten, in many instances it would materially differ from the present translation. According as people are willing to receive the things of God, so the heavens send forth their blessings.”
Very interesting, and it shows how much we don’t know.
One question, and excuse my ignorance in advance: Why do some of the larger intervals have fewer occurrences than lesser included intervals? For example, the years 11.7 to 2580 show 112 fossils, and the years 129-2580 show 1 fossil, and yet 11.7-129 show 199 fossils.
CP: I don’t know. If you look at the original data it appears that the numbers are placeholders for geologic eras. So it’s not that each fossil was independently dated to 11.7k years ago, but rather that it was in the layer of dirt that has been generally dated to 11.7k years ago, so my conjecture would be that, while most fossils clearly fall into a stratigraphic layer that can be dated, that are some contexts in which fossils are found that make the harder to give them a narrower range. (I think, I might be off).
Here are some other linked resources on the topic: https://scripturecentral.org/q-and-a/why-does-the-book-of-mormon-mention-horses
Stephen, I take a pretty flexible view of Book of Mormon chronology, but I’m struggling with the relevance of “129,000 years ago to 2.6 million years ago.”
To get a sense of how big the holocene die-off was we need to also look at the distribution leading up to the BoM times to give us context. It shows how rare fossils for a particular species can be in general. For example, if there were a thousand horse fossils every thousand years up until the holocene, and then a handful after that, something clearly big happened, whereas if there were fewer fossils even when we know there were a lot of horses it gives us a sense of how few organisms actually become a fossil, and therefore how much larger the confidence intervals are.
Ah, got it, thanks!
It’s not just the existence of fossils that is relevant, but the size of the animal. Not all equus are capable of being used/domesticsted/ridden. My understanding (and perhaps I’m wrong) is that the earlier American horses were larger, stronger, more drafty. Those left for Asia and became the modern horse breeds. What was left was quite small, fine boned, and more zebra/deer- like. Which wouldn’t really work for a BOM horse, even if the timing was right…?