Fact of the day

I have just come across a fact which I thought I ought to share.

It seems that we have constructed a very detailed story about the evolution of the horse over the last 50 million years or so, a story over which the creationists and the scientists regularly do battle.

The fact in question, part of that story, is that the horse originated in North America and migrated from there over the Bering Bridge, into Asia, where it thrived in the steppes, going on to carry many hordes of invaders into more prosperous parts, not least Eastern Europe.

Some of the horses stayed on in North America, becoming extinct there rather suddenly, around 10 to 15,000 years ago, about the time that humans were coming across the Bering Bridge in the other direction. Maybe the North American horse was hunted to death by these humans, tiring of their traditional diet of sea-side shell fish.

Reintroduced by the Spaniards towards the end of the fifteenth century, just 500 years ago. Thus completing, as it were, an evolutionary circumnavigation of the globe.