Re: onomatopoetic animal sounds

YHL wrote:
>
>On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Frank George Valoczy wrote:
>
> > Wouldn't horses have come over the landbridge too?
>
>I remember reading that they had, but by the time the conquistadores
>arrived they had all disappeared (hunted down for food?) and the
>conquistadores' own horses were the first in a long time.  The mustangs
>are actually feral horses by descent, not "wild" horses like
>Przewalksi's.
IIRC, horses actually originates in North America. At any rate, horses and
related animals were common there until the later stages of the last Ice
Age. Then they died out, along with most other big mammals of North America
(the so-called "Megafauna"), possibly due to human hunting. When the
conquistadores came, nobody in the America's had seen a horse for many
millennia.

                                                        Andreas
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.