Does DNA Prove the Mythical Origins of These Wild Horses?

[Nevilledog]

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Sarah Zhang
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Aug 16, 2022
@sarahzhang
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When I first moved to DC, I was stunned to learn that just a few hours away, wild horses lived on an uninhabited island off the coast of Maryland/Virginia...
Horses on a beach (credit: NPS)

Sarah Zhang
@sarahzhang
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...how did the wild horses of Assateague Island get there?

Legend has it, they're descendants of horses that survived a 16th century Spanish shipwreck. I wrote about DNA from a new tooth that suddenly sheds some light on this mystery.

theatlantic.com
Does DNA Prove the Mythical Origins of These Wild Horses?
A newly discovered tooth hints at how the Chincoteague ponies got to America.
12:49 PM · Aug 16, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/chincoteague-island-ponies-horses-tooth/671151/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/XWiRk

To tell the story of how a purported cow tooth dug up in the Caribbean might corroborate the mythical origin of wild horses off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, let us begin, naturally, with a children’s book, Misty of Chincoteague.

If you know, you know—horse girls, I’m looking at you. For everyone else: This beloved 1947 children’s novel tells the story of Misty the pony, born on the beaches of an uninhabited barrier island. The story is fictional, but the setting is real. A band of wild horses still roams that island today, eating seagrass and largely ignoring tourists who come for selfies with a real-life version of Misty.

No one knows how the horses first arrived there, but Misty of Chincoteague retells a dramatic bit of local lore. It opens with literal Sturm und Drang. A Spanish galleon carrying Moorish ponies to the gold mines of Peru shipwrecks off the coast of what will later become Maryland and Virginia. The crew perishes, but the ponies swim to a nearby island and survive. “The seasons came and went,” the book goes, “and the ponies adopted the New World as their own.” In their newfound freedom, they became wild—or technically, feral, domesticated but untamed. Today, the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, which manages the southern half of this horse population for historical reasons, promulgates the shipwreck origin story of the island ponies. The National Park Service, which manages the northern half, tells a decidedly less romantic tale: 17th-century settlers probably brought these horses with them.

Enter now the “cow” tooth, actually a horse tooth, mistakenly cataloged decades ago by archaeologists excavating an abandoned 16th-century Spanish settlement. And intriguingly, a recent DNA analysis suggests that the modern breed this Spanish colonial horse is most closely related to is none other than the Chincoteague pony. Given the genetic similarity, could the myth be real after all—were these mysterious ponies also Spanish colonial horses that first arrived by shipwreck?

*snip*

[AZSkiffyGeek]

1. My wife was so excited to visit the islands when she was traveling in DelMarVa

She was a huge fan of the Marguerite Henry book.