Beth Shapiro

We can actually get DNA directly from sediments.

And this has been a relatively recent revelation.

It's super cool because it means that you can take a plug of dirt from the inside of a lake and you can reconstruct the whole ecosystem as it changes over time.

Super cool, right?

Wow.

But recently there was a paper that was published by some colleagues of mine that had done this for sites in Canada.

They found mammoth DNA and horse DNA in Canada in these really well-preserved parts of the world where we've been working that date to probably around 4,000, 5,000 years ago.

10,000?

But there are a lot of Native American cultures who believe that they have a long history of the horse and that the horse has survived.

And it's just dismissed because we don't have evidence for it.

But until we find DNA directly in dirt, I mean, this is just showing us how much we don't know, how much we have to be really willing to...

You know, obviously we have a model of the way the world works and we don't just throw away the model with new data, but we have to incorporate the new data.

But survived elsewhere.

Yeah.

Eohippus, the very first horses are from 50 million years ago.

They're found in Wyoming, in the fossil deposits in Wyoming.

Those are the little house cat sized horses.

Yeah.

But, you know, this is early horses around the same time as we have the first primates and the first of the other things that we know.

That's so fascinating.