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The horse evolves in America
The horse family arose in North America and lived here for over fifty million years, from a forest animal the size of a dog to the animal we know. The evolution of the horse is the textbook case of evolution documented through fossils, but the usual telling as a straight line from small to large is wrong: the family tree is bushy, with many contemporaneous species and several dead ends. The loop is what makes the story North American. When the horse returned with Columbus's second voyage and later spread north, it transformed the Plains cultures — Comanche, Lakota, Cheyenne — into something that had not existed before, in under two hundred years.
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