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That Guy's avatar

Weren't the horses the native americans have from the spanish/European settlers in South America. There were equids on the continent but they may have died out thousands of years before, they may have been a victim of the younger dryas event which may have killed off the large fauna of the americas.

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

Indeed they were. But how could they have survived and formed wild herds without humans to feed them?

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That Guy's avatar

Two thoughts, maybe they were like the modern horses and bred by humans and we're reliant on us for managing their food or maybe they didnt have the dietary peccadillos and were a wild species. Just a thought do the wild horses (mustangs) present in cowboy films what do they eat before they are tamed?

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

> Evolutionary Reasoning is Harder Than It Looks

Evolutionary reasoning is mostly fantasy, which is why I avoid it.

Example:

It is really useful to be able to fly. Why would nature be so stupid as to not give humans the ability to fly? Nature doesn't make mistakes! Are you saying evolution isn't true?

Therefore, clearly, humans can fly.

This is the average level of discourse of evolutionary reasoning in nutrition.

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John Lawrence Aspden's avatar

Oh, maybe I see what you mean. Most discourse about anything is pretty dim, and most people have a pretty hazy grasp of how evolution works. So there's a lot of crap floating around.

But there are people who can do it well. It's beginning to be quite well understood at a gears level these days.

Even evolutionary psychology, which is far from being well worked out, and a laughing stock amongst people who like to mock things they don't understand, is already easily the best explanation of how and why the human mind works that there's ever been. Compare to rubbish like Freud.

Your own favourite Amber O'Hearn is up to her neck in evolutionary arguments. I treat her with great respect. I don't think she's necessarily right about everything, but she's not making silly mistakes.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

But her arguments are far less "Nature doesn't make mistakes!" and more "A->X->B, somehow X is missing, what could it be? Let's speculate."

There are useful evolutionary arguments, but I think of it more as hypothesis generation at best.

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Pip's avatar

There are wild horses in Australia - brumbies. (I think I saw some in the Blue Mountains once, through dawn mist. It seemed quite magical.) I don't know if they're a self-sustaining wild population over many generations, or if only those herds persist which get replenished by escaped horses bred in captivity.

A guess about your puzzle:

- Horses need to eat both grass and some grain, but it needn't be oats specifically.

- Some environments provide both, in the form of seeding wild grasses.

- Horses in these environments cannot overeat the grass-seed part due to natural scarcity.

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Sabiola's avatar

That's my guess as well.

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Healthy By Default's avatar

I’m pretty sure in parts of Australia we have wild horses which were introduced at some point but have managed to survive.

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