Clément Bataille, an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, led a research team that has made significant strides in understanding ancient horse populations. Their pioneering research was just published in that journal, Science. It sheds light both on how horses walked back and forth across land bridges between Eurasia and America and how climate change helped exterminate megaherbivore species during the Late Pleistocene.
This research team — including Zoé Landry, Eve Lindroos, and Auguste Hassler — used state-of-the-art isotope geochemistry instrumentation. They performed their work at the Jan Veizer Stable Isotope Core Facility and the André E. Lalonde AMS National Laboratory. By sequencing the genomes of horses ranging from a few centuries to nearly one million years old, they were able to estimate specimen ages and reconstruct the environments these ancient horses inhabited.
Bataille coordinated all carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses that were central to their study. This study looked at a horse population that was domesticated and adapted to live within the Yukon during the post-glacial warming period. They moved from Eurasia to North America over a land bridge several times. This occurred sometime between 50,000 and 19,000 years ago.
“This concept means that life never moves alone, but follows its ecosystem. Life must move to survive,” said Chief Left Heron, emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and its habitats. Bataille’s research paints a stark picture of horses’ lineage in North America. Certain populations flourished south of the ice sheets, whereas others traversed across present day Alaska and the Yukon.
The research exemplifies an interdisciplinary approach which synthesizes the latest ancient DNA techniques with time-honored traditional Indigenous scientific knowledge. Dr. Yvette Running Horse Collin noted, “The natural migration patterns of our Horse Nation relatives show us clearly that today’s geographic country boundaries and accompanying paleontological labels do not accurately define or capture the actual experience of the horse.” This point of view is a key reminder for the necessity of looking at ecological history and past contemporary political boundaries.
Bataille’s findings aren’t just important for ecology. They also have implications for biodiversity conservation as climate change continues to reshape our planet. He said that this research offers essential insights that communities can use to safeguard the ecosystems we have left in order to protect them today.
Chief Harold Left Heron remarked on the role of horses within ecosystems: “We understand the Horse Nation to be a keystone species that, together with the other life forms with which it shares relationality, brings balance to the ecosystem.”
Their research demonstrates that historical horse populations did not travel independently. Rather, what they did—or better put, how they moved—was mere choreography within much larger ecological stage directions. “In this study we harnessed the full power of the latest generation of DNA sequencing instruments, and Lakota scientific genomic principles,” said Dr. Ludovic Orlando, further affirming the collaborative spirit of this research.