When speaking of horses, historians are in the habit of beginning their discussions by mentioning the Old World (Europe etc.) around eight to ten thousand years ago. This makes it seem that horses must have miraculously appeared at that time. They did not. There were Caballinos, little horsey things, around the world, fifty million (50,000,000) years ago. In some areas they ranged on land that had Louisiana type swamps, with palms, figs, cypress, cat-tails, sycamores, willows, beeches, oaks, and maples. There were shrubs and ferns along the small lifts of the low country. Spruce and fir forests were also to be found on the mountains. Grass grew there, too, though these little horse like things did not eat it. They liked brush seeds and small leaves, instead.
By 500,000 years ago, they had, for some reason, increased in size to four feet, four inches tall, having become real horses. However, changes of continent shape and position, and the resultant changes in climate left them existing only in North America.
In North America these small horses became very well established. They flourished there until their home was invaded by an Ice Age that began to creep down from the Far North, covering North America (the Illinoian Glaciation, about 230,000 years ago). The spreading of the ice over their rangeland made it necessary for them to leave in huge migrations into Europe and Asia. They left in long lines, crossing over the Behring isthmus, or along the Aleut islands where places for transit had formed.
Thereafter, and for causes unknown, any horses left behind in America disappeared.
But the horses living in their new home in Europe and Asia were still not safe from the cold. More ice ages came, driving them hither and thither. Massive, unassailable ridges of snow and barren ice separated them, isolating them into large groups, known as populations. Centuries of separation, one population from another, allowed them to grow quite different from each other. We can glance out over the continental distances, quickly noting the largest and most distinct populations - we see the Przevalsky in Central Asia, two distinct populations of the Tarpan along the Eurasian Southern region, and the Garran, spaced all the way from Ireland to Mongolia, spread out in a long arc along the southern most edge of the ice. We also discern, as we look more closely, that the Würm Glaciation caused all of the the Asiatic horses to acquire their own distinctive characteristics, differing them entirely from those in Iberia.
In Iberia, itself, those horses living in a small area, known as Cantabrica, along the north of Spain and Portugal, found themselves walled in by the ice away from all the rest. Conditions there were severe and unwholesome, without graminaceous growth (grass) of any kind. These unsheltered, tenacious horses were born as tough and keen minded as needed, consuming snow for water, able to thrive on a weedy, shriveled, insufficient aggregation of plant life. [Suggestive of the specie of squirrel that lived under the ice, in Illinois, USA, for thousands of years] During those many, many centuries these Cantabrican horses became well-defined in qualities and appearance, much diversified from both the Asiatic kinds and the ones in the south of Spain.
The ice receded in the Mesolithic age, somewhere around 30,000 years ago. In consequence, horses of all kinds were annexed into human society, beginning the Ages of Valuation of the Varieties of the Horse.
Among the distorted ideas often expressed by historians is their mangled notion of what they misname the 'domestication' of animals. Wilderness living human beings are not likely to 'domesticate' anything, themselves included. Wilderness people live in close proximity to the wildlife around them, with which they often interact favorably, one with the other. It is only a simple matter to make pets out of them, with young born and growing up under those conditions. In fact, most wild things like people, and must learn to fear and distrust them.
Let us say, then, that as the ice melted away and released the horses in Cantabrica, that they had never before laid eyes on a human being. One day, one human being did come along, singing its song. Now, Spanish, that is to say, Iberian horses, when confronted by a strange object, will, more often than not, stand their ground in challenge. They, acting most dragon like, mightily puff themselves up, arch their neck, and blow air rattling and whooshing forcefully through their nostrils (known as 'rolling their nose'). If the object, animate or otherwise, does not approach or retreat, the horse will advance cautiously, repeating the same tempestuous actions until close enough to determine friend or foe. Curiously enough, if the thing is seen as being harmless, the horse will react with pleasure and even playful friendliness.
It is not hard to imagine, therefore, in Iberia, 20,000 years ago, one redheaded, wild Celtiberian girl, having came over before the rest of her people from France, maybe name of Katie O'Hurragan, throwing her blue kilted leg over the back of the first horse ever ridden. Katie, amused by this horse's behavior and its tantalizing snorting, had just naturally crawled on the friendly critter, a sort of an ash colored, blue dun, with zebra stripes on its legs and shoulders.
The little horse took off on a dead run for awhile, she laying down over its neck to hold on. After a few minutes, though, they slowed down and she could wave at one side of its head or the other to make it turn and go where she wanted. A few hours and they got to be great friends. When she got off, that horse wouldn't leave her, just followed along and grazed wherever she went.
She called the little horse a Cabal (sounding like cawal or caval), - a bag full of useful stuff.
As to size - she measured it with her hands, one over the other, fingers together pointing forward - thirteen and a half hands high.
Even so, it must be admitted, there were other people, and other horses, in other places besides Iberia, though they were somewhat slower getting around to growing a relationship of horse and rider. The Caucasus, Persia, the Caspian Sea, Asia Minor, the islands of the Egyptian Sea, and the Balcanica peninsula had horses of an Arab type since very ancient times. Designs of these horses began to appear on painted vases of Cireaica; also in paintings, sculptures, and on Greek, Sicilian, Punic, and Libyan coins. Even Assyrian bas-reliefs of the eighth century BC, and Greek vases of the sixth century BC, show horses of an Arab type. These horses, which have been given the name of Oriental Horses, were the ancestors of the Arabian horse, though undergoing many changes by the time they first became known as The Arabian Horse.
There were horses in northern Africa, too, in what is known as Africa Minor, that is to say, Morocco and its neighboring countries. But since Africa Minor was much like an elongation of Europe into Africa, with its animal and plant populations being so typically European, the similarity of the Andalusian horse in southern Spain with the Barb in Africa would hardly be surprising. And remembering that both of them are derived from the same ice age stock, it is even more to be expected. The Barb, itself, nonetheless, varies from area to area in Africa Minor.
We are consequently assured, by the foregoing archaeological information, that the Spanish horse had already existed thousands of years before the appearance of the Arab in the oriental world.
[The Arab is a relative newcomer in the horse world, but most people have been told it was the origin of all other
horses, the Divine Horse of ALÁ. The Barb is actually much older than the Arab and, as I would point out, of common stock
and origin with the Garran/Andalusian/Connemara/Mongolian population. The Spanish Mustang, though, being from the
northern part of Iberia, is of the Marismeño/Sorraia population.]
Time Segment One -
Ancient Emergence
Time Segment Two - Iberia up through the Moorish Invasion
Time Segment Three - During the Middle Ages
Time Segment Four - Coming to the New World
Time Segment Five - Indian Ponies
Time Segment Six - Anglo Settlement and Westward Expansion
Time Segment Seven - Pushed Aside and Regained
Spanish Mustang Research Facility - Welcome