Thursday, March 30, 2023

LGBTQ rights in Egypt: Queer community battles crackdown


Recent reports suggest that LGBTQ people in Egypt are increasingly being targeted digitally. But activists and observers say that the crackdown is, in fact, systemic.


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Jennifer Holleis
DW
MARCH 30,2023

Human rights organizations and news agencies have recently reported that members of the Egyptian queer community are being increasingly targeted by the police via fake Facebook accounts or fake profiles on dating apps.

"The authorities in Egypt … have integrated technology into their policing of LGBT people," said Rasha Younes, senior LGBTQ rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a report on the group's website.

LGBT, LGBTQ or LGTBQ+ is an acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual and more.

"While digital platforms have enabled LGBT people to express themselves and amplify their voices, they have also become tools for state-sponsored repression," Younes concluded.

However, the London-based Egyptian neuroscientist Ahmed El Hady, who is deeply involved with the Egyptian queer community and who describes himself as "proudly gay" on Twitter, doesn't confirm any increased digital crackdown. "Arrests are systemic and happen all the time on a small scale," he told DW.

This observation was confirmed by Lobna Darwish, a gender rights researcher at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). "In the past 10 years, people have been systematically arrested through entrapment on gay dating websites," she told DW, adding that "over this period, the numbers have remained more or less the same."

"In 2022, we provided legal aid and documented 19 cases that involved 43 defendants who were arrested based on their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity by the vice police, a department that is specialized in combatting illegal sex work, and later accused of charges including habitual practice of debauchery," Darwish told DW.

However, the majority of these people were arrested after having used one of the commonly used dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder or WhosHere.

Queer Egyptians have been systematically targeted and put on trial in the past decade, observers say.
Image: ANDREW BLACK/AFP/Getty Images

Cash and condoms as evidence

There is no doubt that it has become common practice for the police to create fake accounts on these apps. "The police talk to people and flirt with them for days or weeks until they agree to go on a date," Darwish explained. "Ahead of the first meeting, the police person asks them to bring, for example, some condoms," she added.

People then get arrested during the encounter, and the condoms are used as evidence for sex work. Then, they are mostly accused of habitual debauchery according to law No. 10/1961, which is known as the law combatting prostitution, or anti-prostitution law. Other common accusations are immorality or blasphemy.

But even having cash is enough. "Any cash, not even large amounts, is used against them as evidence of sex work," Darwish said.

Homosexuality is not officially illegal in Egypt, but discrimination is rife.

In 2022, Egypt's Ministry of Education issued a new directive to combat homosexuality and associated ideas in media outlets and started promoting anti-LGBTQ awareness campaigns in schools. And, according to a 2019 survey by the independent Washington-based Pew Research Center, the majority of Egyptians believe that homosexuality should not be accepted by society.

In Egypt, homosexuality is not forbidden, but society is widely against open support for queer people.
Image: Herve Champollion/akg-images/picture-alliance

A decade of crackdown

While activists haven't observed any recent increase of digital targeting, they do confirm that discriminatory actions against members of the LGBTQ community have multiplied since Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi came to power in a military coup in 2013. This followed a short period of relative calm under the Muslim Brotherhood's democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi, who was removed after only a year in office.

Ahmed El Hady told DW that the government seemed to want to avoid "a large crackdown" and that "el-Sissi wants to avoid international attention like in the aftermath of the Mashrou' Leila concert in September 2017."

During the concert in Cairo by the enormously popular Lebanese band, which quit last September after ongoing harassment over their songs and discrimination against the queer lead singer Hamed Sinno, some activists waved rainbow flags in support of the queer community in Egypt. Rainbow flags are widely known as a symbol of the LGBTQ community.


However, following the concert, photos and videos of the flag-waving activists went viral on social media. The Egyptian vice police then arrested seven people, who were given jail sentences of varying lengths for public indecency and inciting immorality.

One of those detained, the Egyptian lesbian activist Sarah Hegazi, later turned into a tragic symbol.

Hegazi was allegedly tortured and sexually molested by other female prisoners on police orders. The 30-year-old committed suicide due to severe depression stirred by trauma some three years after she was granted political asylum in Canada.

Sarah Hegazi is seen on a placard here during Cyprus' first pride parade in 2022
Image: CHRISTINA ASSI/AFP/Getty Images

Warnings not useful for all


As a result of the recent warnings, the US-based dating app Grindr has installed a warning in English and Arabic for its users. "We have been alerted that Egyptian police is [sic] actively making arrests of gay, bi, and trans people on digital platforms. They are using fake accounts and have also taken over accounts from real community members who have already been arrested and had their phones taken. Please take extra caution […]," the warning reads.


But for the Berlin-based Egyptian activist Nora Noralla, the executive director at Cairo 52, a Cairo-based legal research institute that defends members of the queer community pro bono, this is nothing but show. "It is neither the first time they have put this up, nor are they the only ones," Noralla told DW.

She would much prefer that Grindr, as well as other apps, verified users and forbad police forces to set up profiles. "With such a warning, they merely create the illusion of corporate responsibility," she said.

Activist Ahmed El Hady also agrees that Grindr could do more to protect its users, "but at the end of the day, they cannot fight the government actively," he told DW.

"If Grindr is infiltrated by the state, they might need to cease operating in Egypt," El Hady said. He also knows of cases where even having this app installed on a phone was enough to attract an interrogation by police.

Proof of trust for LGBTQ


Both activists highlight that the queer community has established workarounds to increase the safety of its members. However, for those who are new to the community, these workarounds possibly remain out of reach, at least in the beginning.

"When you meet someone new on an app, you usually check their other social media accounts," El Hady told DW. Once the identity of the new contact is confirmed in this way, communications are no longer carried out via the app's messaging platforms but "via encrypted apps like Signal."

First meetings normally only happen after other members of the community have additionally confirmed the person's identity. "We meet at safe houses of friends or members of the community, and never use the same location twice," he said.

Nora Noralla, for her part, sees that the "community is growing despite the arrests."

"Sadly, the environment is not the best, but we are far from crumbling," she says.

DW reached out to Grindr and the Egyptian public prosecution authorities but hadn't received a reply at the time of the publication.

Edited by: Timothy Jones


A protest sign with a transgender symbol and flag on it

Transgender Day of Visibility

The International Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31 is dedicated to celebrating the lives of transgender people.

GENDER

 IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

















   



CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
4 bankers convicted over Swiss account of longtime Putin pal


By JAMEY KEATEN

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, presents a medal to Russian cellist Sergei Roldugin, during an awarding ceremony in Moscow's Kremlin, Russia, on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2016. Four former bankers with the now-shuttered Swiss affiliate of a major Russian bank have gone on trial over allegations that they didn't properly check accounts opened in the name of a Russian cellist with longtime ties to President Vladimir Putin
. (AP Photo/Ivan Sekretarev, Pool, File)

GENEVA (AP) — Four former bankers with the Swiss affiliate of a key Russian bank were found guilty Thursday of failing to properly check accounts opened in the name of a Russian cellist with longtime ties to President Vladimir Putin.

The defendants were handed suspended sentences in Zurich district court that, if violated, could lead collectively to hundreds of thousands of Swiss francs in fines.

Lawyers for all the defendants immediately announced plans to appeal, according to an email from a spokesman for Gazprombank Switzerland, which is in the process of winding down its operations and wasn’t itself facing charges.

The verdict follows a one-day trial on March 8 based on information about secret financial flows revealed in the Panama Papers leaks in 2016 that implicated musician and Putin’s childhood friend Sergei Roldugin. It took years for prosecutors to unravel the web of money and bring the case to court.

The trial opened a rare window into allegations from the Panama Papers that a member of Putin’s circle of friends helped funnel millions abroad and that financial employees may have turned a blind eye to such inflows. Putin has denied the accusations.

The former Gazprombank employees — three Russian-born and one Swiss-born, who couldn’t be named under Swiss law — were charged with failing to adequately check whether Roldugin actually owned the assets in the accounts. He was a bank customer from 2014 to 2016.

All four defendants denied the charges, which include allegations of violating Swiss anti-money-laundering law.

In a statement, the Zurich regional prosecutors office said it welcomed the verdicts as “an important signal that due diligence obligations under money laundering law must be observed.”

Both before and since Putin ordered forces into Ukraine, Western nations have imposed sanctions against oligarchs and others with close ties to his government, including Roldugin.

The U.S. Treasury Department describes Roldugin as “part of a system that manages President Putin’s offshore wealth.”

Documents filed when the accounts were opened listed expected transactions of 11.5 million Swiss francs ($12.2 million). The indictment didn’t indicate how much may have arrived at the bank, but noted how Putin has “enormous assets managed by people close to him.”

Gazprombank maintained the accounts despite “abundant” media reports about Roldugin’s relationship to Putin, including that he was godfather to one of Putin’s daughters, the indictment said.

The bank’s documents listed Roldugin’s income as 1 million Swiss francs a year, his assets at 10 million francs, and his occupation as a musician, indicating that the money flows were “in no way plausible as Roldugin’s own wealth,” the indictment said. It said the way the accounts were structured indicated he was being used as “a straw man.”

In 2016, when reports named Roldugin as the owner of $2 billion in offshore assets, Putin denied having any links to offshore accounts and described the Panama Papers leaks as part of Western efforts to weaken Russia.

The verdict was largely symbolic: The public prosecutor’s office sought seven-month suspended prison sentences for the defendants.

For years, Switzerland has sought to clean up its reputation as a secret haven of billions in ill-gotten or laundered money, including through legislation that requires bankers to scrutinize the origin of funds associated with “politically exposed persons.”
'Planetary emergency': Legal action 'a signal to govts they cannot continue ignoring IPCC reports'

Issued on: 30/03/2023 - 

05:20
Video by:Tom Burges WATSON

Cases opened Wednesday before the European Court of Human Rights against France and Switzerland over alleged failings to protect the environment, marking the first time governments are in the court's dock for alleged climate change inaction. The case against Switzerland is based on a complaint by an association of elderly people -- who call themselves the "Club of Climate Seniors" -- concerned with the consequences of global warming on their living conditions and health, the ECHR said. They accuse the Swiss authorities of various climate change failings which they say amount to a violation of the government's obligation to protect life and citizens' homes and families. For more on unprecedented climate change legal action against the French and Swiss governments, FRANCE 24 is joined by Professor and Climatologist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele.
Tunisia should release critics of president: Amnesty

AFP
Thu, Mar 30, 2023


Tunisian authorities should release detainees arrested on "unfounded accusations of conspiracy" and drop their criminal investigation mostly targeting political opponents of President Kais Saied, Amnesty International said Thursday.

Since mid-February, authorities have arrested many of the most prominent opponents of Saied, who has publicly alleged they were plotting against the state and labelled them "terrorists".

Saied has seized almost total power since he froze parliament and sacked Tunisia's government in July 2021.

Opponents accuse him of reinstating autocratic rule in the North African country which was the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring uprising more than a decade ago.

The criminal investigation into at least 17 people is "among the most nakedly aggressive attacks by authorities" since Saied's power grab, Amnesty said in a statement.

Those targeted include opposition party members, political activists, lawyers, and the head of a popular radio station known for giving a platform to criticism of the president.

"The Tunisian authorities should immediately release all those detained for whom they cannot present credible evidence of criminal conduct as recognised by international law, and close the investigations against them," Amnesty's regional director Heba Morayef said.

The rights group alleged some of those detained had been questioned about meetings with one another, foreign diplomats and journalists, acts it said are protected under rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly.

"Just 12 years after Tunisians staged a revolution for dignity and basic freedoms, authorities are returning with frightening speed to old repressive tactics," Morayef said.

"Rounding up and jailing dissidents on vague accusations sends a chilling message that no one in Tunisia can freely express his or her opinions without fear of human rights violations, including arbitrary arrest and detention," Morayef said.

Several dozen supporters of the detainees protested on Thursday morning outside the Tunis courthouse, demanding their release and chanting: "Down with the coup" and "Freedom to all political prisoners".

Saied took control of the judiciary last year and has said judges who "dare to exonerate" the detainees will be considered "accomplices".

Amnesty said this statement, "coupled with the president’s arbitrary dismissal of 57 judges in 2022, contributes to a climate of intimidation for the judiciary."

par/noc/it

Senegal opposition leader gets suspended sentence for libel

10 hours ago10 hours ago

The libel trial and another separate case against Ousmane Sonko have spurred violent protests nationwide. Sonko was given a suspended prison sentence and a fine for libel of a government minister.

Senegal's opposition leader Ousmane Sonko has been given a two-month suspended prison sentence and a fine for libel.

The 48-year-old was found guilty of defaming Tourism Minister Mame Mbaye Niang, a member of President Macky Sall's party.

Sonko had claimed the tourism minister stole $47 million (€44 million) from a government agency.

The opposition leader also faces separate charges of sexual abuse.

There were fears that the trial's outcome could disqualify Sonko from running in the next year's presidential election.

But lawyers representing Mbaye Niang said it would not.

Violence in Dakar ahead of trial

Sonko and his supporters accuse the government of using the justice system to prevent him from participating in the election.

Violence had flared in several cities since the trial opened on March 16

Police fired tear gas during clashes with students on Wednesday trying to hold a banned demonstration supporting Sonko.

Sonko — who came third in the last elections — has called on the president to publicly declare that he will not seek a third presidential term.

Sall has declared neither an intention to run nor a plan to step aside.

Senegal, which has long been a democratic example in West Africa, allows its head of state two consecutive presidential terms of five years but the opposition claims Sall intends to override the constitution.

lo/msh (AFP, Reuters)

Senegal opposition leader trial: Who is Ousmane Sonko?


Issued on: 30/03/2023
02:00
Video by: Olivia BIZOTF Sharon GAFFNEY

More protests are expected in Dakar, Senegal today as opposition leader Ousmane Sonko is due in court on libel charges. Yesterday, security forces fired tear and stun grenades to disperse his supporters and shops closed early. Sonko had been charged with libel, for accusing the tourism minister of embezzlement. He said the charges were a tactic to eliminate him from the presidential race. FRANCE 24's Sharon Gaffney and Oliva Bizot tell us more about Ousmane Sonko.

Migrants to Europe face 'inhuman' pushbacks — report

 

The Council of Europe's Comittee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) published its annual report on Monday, criticizing member states and particularly those on the EU's external border for "inhuman and degrading treatment" of migrants pushed back from their borders.

Foreign nationals were subjected to "punches, slaps blows with truncheons, other hard objects [...] by police or border guards," the CPT said in the report.

What tactics were used against the migrants?

The report did not list specifics on the numbers of cases or the most likely locations, but spoke of "numerous consistent and credible allegations" of mistreatment "at the borders of several Council of Europe member states."

It said it had examined pushback practices along all of the major known land and sea routes, destined mainly for EU member states in the end, in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and on Europe's eastern borders.

"Other forms of inhuman and degrading treatment were also deployed, such as firing bullets close to the persons' bodies while they lay on the ground, pushing them into rivers (sometimes with their hands still tied)," the report said.

Officials also coerced the migrants to remove their clothes and shoes, "forcing them to walk barefoot and/or in their underwear and, in some cases, even fully naked across the border."

The CPT also gathered medical evidence, such as dog-bite marks on the limbs of affected people. The supporting evidence for the pushback operations, as mentioned by the victims, was collected by examining informal logbooks, CCTV footage, and photographs at the European frontier, the CPT said.

'Pushbacks must end'

"Many European countries face very complex migration challenges at their borders, but this does not mean they can ignore their human rights obligations. Pushbacks are illegal, unacceptable, and must end," said the head of CPT, Alan Mitchell.

The Committee also urged its 46 member states to ensure that migrants have the right to proper medical and vulnerability assessments and can apply for asylum.

"Detention should only be used as a measure of last resort," the report said.

The migrants should also be protected against ill-treatment during the detention and have access to a lawyer, and be made aware of their rights, the report added. It urged for cases of detention to be accurately recorded.

Rising numbers of refugees

More than 5 million people came to Europe at the end of 2016, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) website.

Thousands have been either killed or gone missing during their journeys since 2015.

Also, the number of migrants arriving in Europe doubled in 2022 compared to the previous year, reaching up to 330,000 in numbers, according to EU's border agency Frontex.

Russia's war on Ukraine has also added to migratory pressures as countries face higher food and fuel prices.

Russia was excluded from the Council of Europe and by extension the CPT after its invasion of Kyiv last year.

aa/msh (AFP)

Hat tip: Italy's Borsalino fedoras are back putting on the style

Issued on: 30/03/2023 

















Timeless style: a Borsalino fedora 

Alessandria (Italy) (AFP) – Humphrey Bogart, Michael Jackson and Al Capone had one thing in common. All were fans of the Borsalino fedora hat, which is now enjoying a comeback.

Italy's legendary brand -- long synonymous with dapper, rugged masculinity -- has dusted itself down since it was driven into bankruptcy in 2017 by an unscrupulous boss.

Franco-Italian financier Philippe Camperio has put it back on its feet and revived sales while staying true to its age-old traditional techniques.

Time appears to stand still in its Piedmonte factory near Alessandria, southwest of Milan. Wooden machines dating from 1888 are used to make the felt from piles of rabbit fur, with only the softest strands selected.

They are then sent in a cloud of steam onto a rotating cone, gradually taking the form of a fedora, before being sprayed with hot water and singed with flames.

The process is unchanged since the brand was founded more than a century and a half ago.

It takes seven weeks to make a felt hat at Borsalino 

It takes seven weeks to make a felt hat, with about 50 steps in the process. And most of those steps are done by hand.

"When our factory opened in 1888, the machinery was ahead of its time. Today, we are one of the last craftsmen in the world to make hats by hand," said Borsalino's purchasing manager Alessandro Mortarino.

Rabbit hair is used because it is "softer, more consistent and more malleable than wool," he said.

- A new lease on life -


Daniele Fascia, a craftsman who has worked at Borsalino for 15 years, is busy shaping a future fedora. He flattened its wide edges and delicately moulded the crown, using quick gestures with surgical precision.

Artisans mould and shape the Fedoras, using quick gestures with surgical precision 


"The machines help us, but the main part is done by hand. We respect tradition", he said.

The classic Borsalino fedora costs 300 euros ($327) on average. But the luxurious Panama Montecristi, which takes six months to make, can set you back up to 1,650 euros.

A poster from Jacques Deray's 1974 film "Borsalino" starring French actor Alain Delon -- wearing a fedora, of course -- hangs over the company's brightly lit showroom, lined by tall cases containing hats of all shapes and colours.

The appointment last year of Jacopo Politi as head of styling, formerly with the Chanel-owned Paris milliner Maison Michel, has breathed new life into the hatmaker.

Besides the classic felt hats or summery straw Panamas, Borsalino now offers more playful baseball caps, bucket hats and especially berets, which Politi, 44, said were a hit with young people.

Borsalino has benefited from a renewed enthusiasm for hats since the early 2000s, the designer said.


Besides classic felt hats or Panamas, the brand now offers baseball caps and even berets © GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP

"The hat was considered old-fashioned and locked away in a wardrobe, but now it's back in fashion," Politi said.

- Women clients -


The brand is als
o looking to attract more women customers, who now account for half of revenue, up 30 percent since the ownership change.

"Our goal is to increase their share to 60 or 65 percent," owner Camperio told AFP.

After sales plunged by half in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, they began to recover in 2021 and increased by 25 percent to 20 million euros ($21.8 million) last year.

"For 2023, we are once again aiming for a 20 to 25 percent revenue growth," said Camperio, executive chairman of the private equity company Haeres Equita.

Alain Delon is one of the many movie stars to have worn a Borsalino 

Borsalino's former boss, Marco Marenco, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2016 for fraudulent bankruptcy, leaving the company with debts of 34 million euros.

But now the page has turned. A new Borsalino Museum will be inaugurated in Alessandria on April 4, where more than 2,000 hats that have marked the history of the storied brand will go on display.



PHOTOS:  GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP

© 2023 AFP



Legendary UK guitar amp maker agrees Swedish takeover


AFP
Thu, March 30, 2023 


Britain's Marshall Amplification, legendary maker of guitar amps used by rock icons including Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, agreed Thursday to a takeover from Swedish speaker giant Zound Industries.

Zound will buy family-owned Marshall Amplification to create a new giant called Marshall Group, they said in a joint statement that gave no financial details.

"Marshall Group is born, bringing together rock'n'roll legend Marshall Amplification and Zound Industries to pioneer the future of sound and technology," the statement added.

The Marshall family will become the largest shareholder in the group with a 24-percent stake.

The price was "not disclosed" but the new group's headquarters "will be in Stockholm", a Zound spokesman told AFP.

Stockholm-based Zound produces wireless speakers and headphones, including under the Marshall name.

Thursday's deal, which includes all Marshall brands and subsidiaries, creates a group with combined annual sales exceeding $360 million.

Founder Jim Marshall worked as an engineer and a drummer and owned a London music shop before he began to build amplifiers in his garage in the early 1960s, before forming the Marshall Amplification company in 1962. He died in 2012 aged 88.

Rock legends Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend are also among those who used the London-born businessman's amplifiers in order to exploit the distinctive Marshall sound.

"Since my father and I created the original Marshall amp back in 1962, we have always looked for ways to deliver the pioneering Marshall sound to music lovers of all backgrounds and music tastes across the world," Jim's son Terry said in Thursday's statement.

"I'm confident that the Marshall Group will elevate this mission and spur the love for the Marshall brand."

Zound chairman Henri de Bodinat, who will hold the same role in the new group, added that the deal will bring "even greater innovation and value to clients, employees, and investors alike".

ode-rfj/imm
Native Americans corralled Spanish horses decades before Europeans arrived

DNA and skeletal clues rewrite the tale of how horses came to the Great Plains by the 1600s


A collaboration between Western scientists and Native Americans finds that Indigenous groups rapidly incorporated horses of Spanish ancestry into Great Plains cultures by the early 1600s. Some Indigenous oral histories say their relationship with horses goes back even farther to possible equine survivors of the Ice Age. SACRED WAY SANCTUARY


By Bruce Bower
 Science News
30/3/2023

Indigenous knowledge and Western science have written a new tale about when horses most recently arrived in North America.

Spaniards brought horses to Mexico in 1519. Indigenous peoples then took the reins, rapidly transporting offspring of those equine newcomers north along trade routes. As a result, a new study finds, many Native American populations across the Great Plains and the Rockies had incorporated horses into their ways of life by the early 1600s, decades before encountering any Europeans.

This unconventional scenario of how domesticated horses originally spread throughout central and western North America bucks a previous narrative: European written accounts dating mainly to the 1700s and 1800s had contended that horses first spread into North America in large numbers after Pueblo people temporarily drove Spanish settlers out of New Mexico in 1680. But little evidence existed to confirm or deny that claim.

Europeans’ historical texts didn’t ring true for molecular archaeologist Yvette Running Horse Collin of the Center for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. Running Horse Collin is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Great Plains populations such as the Lakota and Comanche speak of having cared for, herded and otherwise interacted with horses long before Europeans showed up.

Running Horse Collin contacted Toulouse colleague Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist who has traced the origins of domesticated horses to southwestern Asia more than 4,200 years ago (SN: 10/20/21). The duo organized a large collaboration of Western scientists and Indigenous scholars and officials, including members of the Lakota, Comanche, Pawnee and Pueblo Nations.

“Our findings indicate that horses spread from Mexico into North America by the turn of the 17th century and were raised locally, which strikingly lines up with Native American perspectives,” archaeozoologist William Taylor of the University of Colorado Boulder said at a March 28 news conference. Results of their investigation appear in the March 31 Science.

Taylor directed an effort that located and radiocarbon-dated previously excavated remains of 23 horses from western North America and six horses from Argentina. Three of the North American horses dated to the second half of the 1500s, well before the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Those specimens came from sites in Kansas, New Mexico and Wyoming. Reanalysis of a previously radiocarbon-dated horse’s remains from an Idaho site, using a technique that measures the amount of near-infrared radiation absorbed by bone, produced a comparably early age estimate.
Rock art of an undetermined age at a Wyoming site depicts a horse and rider that researchers suspect was carved by ancestral Comanche or Shoshone people.PAT DOAK

What’s particularly important is that those finds yielded evidence of Native American groups caring for, riding and culturally embracing horses by the early 1600s, says archaeologist Mark Mitchell of the Paleocultural Research Group in Broomfield, Colo., who did not participate in the new study.

The earliest North American horse remains include bony growths at the back of the skull consistent with the use of a halter or bridle, Taylor said. One horse from the 1500s displayed the kind of dental damage seen from use of a bridle’s metal bit. Another early horse had been found among various ritual artifacts, indicating that it had held ceremonial meaning of some kind.

Analyses of diet-related chemical elements in teeth typical of particular geographic regions indicated that one early North American horse had grown up locally. Another was raised even farther north, probably part of a managed herd that was fed maize during part of the year, the researchers say.

DNA comparisons with a range of modern horses showed that early North American horses were primarily of Spanish ancestry.

Some Indigenous oral histories suggest that their interactions with horses go back thousands of years to equines that might have survived the Ice Age. But analysis of DNA retrieved from remains of two Ice Age horses previously found in Alaska — one dating to about 26,100 years ago and another to around 28,400 years ago — showed no direct ties to later North American horses. Scientists generally suspect that wild horses first evolved in North America over tens of millions of years before dying out around 10,000 years ago.

For now, the scientific evidence just supports the pre-European integration of horses into Great Plains societies, says University of Oxford archaeologist Peter Mitchell, who was not part of the new investigation. Further research needs to establish precisely how long ancient wild horses survived in Alaska, he says.

Taylor and his colleagues have nonetheless married Western science to Indigenous knowledge in a way that “sets a new standard for archaeological research into the early spread of the horse and the take-up of horse usage by Indigenous groups” throughout the world, Mitchell says.


HORSE NATIONS
After the Spanish conquest, horses transformed Native American tribes much earlier than historians thought



30 MAR 2023
BY ANDREW CURRY

Ethnohistorian Yvette Running Horse Collin has studied the Lakotas’ ancient bond with horses, reflected in ceremonial battle gear. JACQUELYN CORDOVA


Table of contents
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 379, Issue 6639.Download PDF

Scattered across the prairie east of the Colorado Front Range are rings of ancient stones. The rings were used to anchor tipis, and they measure barely 2 meters across. Matt Reed, the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma’s tribal historic preservation officer, says that tiny footprint comes as a surprise to modern Pawnee, whose traditional tipis are big enough to fit whole families.

The change, Reed explains, resulted from the introduction of the horse. For millennia, the Pawnee had relied on dogs to haul their belongings on bison hunting trips; when they acquired horses, the impact was immediate and dramatic. “They allowed us to carry more gear, pull more food, have bigger tipis,” Reed says. “It’s so hard to imagine our culture without horses, it boggles your mind.”

For Native peoples on the Great Plains grasslands that stretch from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri River, horses took on a central economic and military role, enabling bison hunting on a large scale and raiding across vast distances. “The introduction of this technology, of horses, changed Great Plains cultures,” says Carlton Shield Chief Gover, a member of the Pawnee Nation and an archaeologist at the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “It’s the equivalent of the airplane. It shrank the world.” Knowing when that happened is critical, he says. A new study today in Science, of which Shield Chief Gover is a co-author, offers a startling answer.

Centuries ago, the Americas were apparently horseless—even though Equus had evolved in the Americas more than 4 million years ago, spreading west from there into Eurasia and Africa. When the ancestors of Native Americans entered North America toward the end of the last ice age, more than 14,000 years ago, they would have encountered herds of wild horses. From the archaeological evidence—cutmarks on bones found at a handful of sites—it seems early Americans hunted horses and used their bones as tools, but did not domesticate or ride them. And by 5000 years ago at the latest, the fossil record suggests, North America’s horses were gone. Along with nearly 40 other species of megafauna, from saber-toothed tigers and mammoths to camels, they were wiped out by hunting, climate change, or both.

It wasn’t until 1519 C.E., when Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés made landfall on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, that horses entered the Americas again. His 16 horses stunned local people, and the shock helped him defeat the Aztec Empire just 2 years later. In the centuries that followed, the horse spread once again across the continent, this time as a status symbol, means of transport, and hunting companion rather than prey. In the process, it set off massive human migrations, as some Native groups shifted to more mobile lifestyles. It also unleashed struggles over resources on the Plains and elsewhere.

Historians have tended to date the widespread adoption of the horse by Native peoples to the 18th century, when the first European travelers recorded its presence in the central and northern Plains. But in the sweeping new study, based on archaeological evidence, radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, and ancient DNA, Shield Chief Gover and dozens of other researchers conclude that horses had made it that far north up to a century earlier. The study shows they had begun to spread within a few decades after the Spanish introduced them to the Southwest in the 16th century.

“It’s a really detailed, round, robust, multimethodology way of looking at the data set that starts to define, from an archaeological perspective, when horses appear in the American West,” says University of Oxford archaeologist Peter Mitchell, who was not involved with the research. “This paper totally changes the game.”

DESPITE THE HORSE’S iconic importance to so many Native cultures, little archaeological research has been done on its spread. Written records reveal such details as the names of Cortés’s steeds and the first time Spanish soldiers encountered Comanche warriors on horseback. But because the horse’s dispersal happened mostly out of sight of European chroniclers, much of the process wasn’t documented, or was written in a way that emphasized the role of Spanish and later settlers.

Petroglyphs in southern Wyoming, probably dating to the early 17th century, include well-preserved images of horses and riders, depicted with riding equipment and shields. The site is connected with ancestral Comanche and Shoshone people. PAT DOAK

Based on those written sources, many historians have tended to compress the adoption of the horse by tribes throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains into a pivotal half-century, beginning in 1680 with a bloody revolt against Spanish rule by Pueblo people in New Mexico and ending with the first European accounts of horses on the northern Plains. After the uprising, the story goes, the Pueblos sold thousands of horses that had belonged to the expelled Spanish to neighboring tribes. “What historians argue is that the Pueblo Revolt pushes a volume of horses, enough to transform tribes,” far to the north, says Dan Flores, an emeritus historian at the University of Montana, Missoula.

“In the aftermath of the Great Southwestern Rebellion, the horse frontier moved rapidly outward from New Mexico along the ancient Indigenous trade routes,” Oxford historian Pekka Hämäläinen writes in Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, a history of Native societies published last year. “A Rocky Mountain trade chain had carried horses to the Northwestern Plains by the 1730s. … The horse trade ignited a technological revolution that reconfigured several Indigenous worlds within a generation.”

Historians weren’t fazed by the implication that it took so little time for the horse to be incorporated into Native economies, military strategy, and religious ritual across a vast geographic area. Flores and others argue that adoption was facilitated by contact with the Spanish, who employed Pueblo people to herd horses and other livestock in New Mexico in the early 1600s. “You have to have a horse-riding culture and technology, along with the animal, to make this work,” he says.

Native accounts contradicted the timeline centered on the Pueblo Revolt, suggesting some tribes had acquired horses much earlier, but “oral tradition was discounted,” says Comanche historian Jimmy Arterberry, a co-author of the Science study. “The end result has been to discredit the antiquity of the relationship between Native people and horses,” adds University of Colorado, Boulder, archaeologist William Taylor, also a co-author.

Until recently, archaeologists took the compressed historical timeline for granted. When they excavated horse remains on the Great Plains, they usually assumed the bones were either very old, dating from before the disappearance of horses many millennia ago, or very recent, from animals brought to the Plains by European settlers. As a result, many horse remains found on the Great Plains wound up in paleontological collections rather than archaeology labs. Just a handful had been radiocarbon dated. The Science study includes dozens of new dates and shifts the timeline earlier.

Dates of horse remains from sites in Wyoming and Nebraska, for example, show people far beyond the Spanish frontier were breeding, feeding, herding, and caring for horses—and probably riding them—beginning sometime after 1550, and had thoroughly incorporated them into their societies by 1650 at the latest. That “provides more time for the transformations the horse brought about to take place,” Mitchell says.

Archaeologist William Taylor inspects the jawbone of a foal from Blacks Fork, Wyoming.
PETER BITTNER

Some historians say they’ve made steps in that direction, using ethnographic and linguistic evidence. The idea that horses might have been adopted by Native groups in New Mexico and beyond in the 1600s, prior to the Pueblo Revolt, “is pretty much in line with what historians have been writing for the last 20 or 30 years,” says Ted Binnema, a historian at the University of Northern British Columbia. “The entire military history of the Plains seems to make sense with this timeline.”

But pushing the arrival of the horse back much further is a stretch, he says. Spanish troops entering New Mexico in 1598 make no mention of encountering mounted warriors. “Any evidence Indigenous groups were already equestrian before 1598 would be a big discovery,” Binnema says. “But this isn’t enough to convince me.”

EMILY LENA JONES keeps what the zooarchaeologist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, considers the key evidence in a clear plastic organizing tub. Inside are Ziploc bags filled with fragmented, bleached-white horse bones from a village on the outskirts of Albuquerque. The site, called Paa’ko, was settled by Puebloan people beginning in 1525, and briefly used as a mission by the Spanish between 1650 and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

For decades after it was first excavated in the 1930s, researchers assumed the handfuls of horse bones at Paa’ko dated from that short-lived Spanish occupation. They identified them as the remains of the Spanish friar’s mounts, eaten by the Native residents.

When Jones radiocarbon dated the bones in 2020, she was surprised to find they were at least 400 years old and probably even predated the establishment of the first Spanish settlement in New Mexico in 1598. Given Spanish records describing the horse as a tightly restricted military asset, the idea that they were in areas not under Spanish control came as a surprise. The new timing, she says, “opens up a wide range of cultural change happening outside of European view.” Jones thinks Paa’ko might have been an early transit point where Native people moved horses from Spanish-controlled areas east to the Plains.

As she, Taylor, and other members of their team gathered radiocarbon dates from sites across the Great Plains, they found more samples that predated the Pueblo Revolt—some by nearly a century. At a site in southwestern Wyoming called Blacks Fork, a young foal was buried together with three coyote skulls, evidence it may have been part of a religious ceremony. Analysis of the animal’s bones and teeth shows it was about 6 months old when it died. Bone formations on its skull suggested it was tethered, and a healed facial fracture showed it had been kicked by another horse—all support for the idea that it was kept close to other horses, and given veterinary care to help it recover from its wound.

Some researchers who analyzed the site in the 1990s discounted the possibility that Native people would have known how to handle a horse that way. Instead, they speculated the Blacks Fork horse might have been brought to the region by an unrecorded Spanish expedition.

But the new radiocarbon date for the Blacks Fork horse shows it was raised, tethered, and buried sometime between 1600 and 1650, many hundreds of kilometers north of Paa’ko and Spanish outposts in New Mexico. “I was very surprised by the Blacks Fork horse. I thought we’d find some horses that were earlier than the overarching narrative said, but I didn’t expect this line of inquiry to bear fruit so quickly,” Jones says. “Every time we’ve thrown something in there, it’s come back in this earlier date range.”

“People are going to have to go back into their collections and start redating horses,” Shield Chief Gover says. “This is upending the status quo.”

IN HIS RED PICKUP, Taylor and his team continue to visit local and regional museums from Wyoming to Kansas in search of bones to analyze. “To engage with this material requires putting a lot of miles on the odometer and working with a lot of small collections,” Taylor says. As they persuade curators to part with bits of bone for radiocarbon and chemical testing, the team also digitizes the bones with a hand-held 3D scanner. Back at their computers in Boulder, they can measure and analyze the scans digitally, or even print out plastic copies to share with the public.

A healed fracture on a foal's right jaw suggests tribes in Wyoming cared for horses by the 17th century.
PETER BITTNER

The results enable them to go beyond the age of the bones to the lives of the horses—and of the humans who cared for and relied on them. In a darkened lab at the museum, Taylor and Lakota grad student Chance Ward, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, deploy beetles to scour the flesh from modern horse cadavers. The modern bones serve as references: Draft horses, wild horses, horses ridden in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona or the steppes of Mongolia—all show distinctive skeletal changes that can be compared with marks on the ancient North American bones.

Cradling a 3D printed copy of a horse skull from Mongolia, Taylor points to a groove midway along the long, sloping nose, caused by pressure from a bridle. “If you press on this continuously for 10 years, you get marks that are diagnostic,” he says. “It’s negative space, but in 3D models we can measure it.”

Similar marks in bones from early Native American horses can help prove they carried a rider, wore a bridle, or pulled a travois—a frame, made of two poles and a net, that Plains people used to drag loads. Metal ring bits adopted from the Spanish caused distinctive fractures in an animal’s teeth and palate; rawhide bridles developed by Native people wore telltale grooves in the lower jaw. “Every little aspect of human activity and relationship to horses leaves a signature, if we can find it,” Taylor says. “It’s not just whether people rode them, but also how.”

The bones contain other clues, too. Horse teeth found on the banks of the Kansas River in northeastern Kansas, and dated to before 1650—at least 30 years before the Pueblo Revolt—are a good example. Isotopes in the teeth reflect those in the groundwater where the animal was reared. They show the horse, about 9 years old when it died, had spent time farther north, perhaps in Iowa, before it was moved into Kansas. The isotopes also show it was fed corn, a wintertime staple for Plains people. “It’s an incredible snapshot of an animal that was deeply integrated into Indigenous culture,” Taylor says—and another bit of evidence, he thinks, that the spread of horses across the continent didn’t “have anything to do with European people other than that first horse off the boat.”

Instead, that rapid spread highlights the intricate trade networks and political alliances that knit together tribes from the arid Southwest to the forests of the Missouri River valley. And ultimately, understanding the movements of horses through isotopic and genetic analyses could help trace human migration during a tumultuous period. “Knowing when horses are where they are, and who has them, can add to our understanding of tribal history and politics,” Shield Chief Gover says. “Archaeological research can provide tangible history that ties people back to places.”

PERHAPS THE MOST striking aspect of the Science study is how it shows Native views and laboratory science can enhance—and also challenge—each other.

In 2018, University of Toulouse geneticist Ludovic Orlando received an email with an unusual request. Orlando had just published a wide-ranging paper tracing the lineage of horses across the world today to the steppes of Eurasia around 2000 B.C.E. The email came from ethnohistorian Yvette Running Horse Collin of the Oglala Lakota Nation, who had just defended a doctoral dissertation with a very different perspective. Drawing on Native oral histories—including the Lakota tradition that the tribe has had a relationship with the horse “since time immemorial”—Collin argued that the horse never went extinct in the Americas at all. The arrival of Spanish horses in 1519, in her view, had been a reunion rather than a reintroduction.

Intrigued, Orlando invited her to Toulouse—and eventually to collaborate on a genetic investigation into the origins of Native horses that became part of the Science paper. “I very rapidly realized there was room for questions about the origins of the horse,” Orlando says, “and we developed an experimental design to test all this.” Collin, for her part, says the horse seemed like an ideal vehicle “to further a discussion” on marrying Native and Western approaches to knowledge. “I did not come to Ludovic to help me to prove what we already know,” she says.

Together with Taylor and other colleagues, the Toulouse team collected DNA from the bones of 29 horses of the historic period, from the 17th century and later, along with samples from modern horses cared for by the Lakota and other tribes. They then compared the DNA with Orlando’s database of modern and ancient horse genomes.

Coming home GRAPHIC
 
Horses evolved millions of years ago in North America and, after spreading to Eurasia and Africa, went extinct in their homeland at the end of the last ice age. Spanish and British colonizers brought them back.Original dispersal from Great PlainsBefore 1400 C.E. (Viking)After 1400 C.E. (Spanish/Portuguese)After 1600 C.E. (Dutch/British)The Great Plains 
(GRAPHIC) D. AN-PHAM/SCIENCE; (DATA) W. T. TAYLOR/UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

The results showed horses on the Great Plains in the historic period were closely related to horses in Spain at the same time. By the 1770s, however, genetic signatures from British breeds began to filter into the region, and horses there today show a mix of both Spanish and British ancestry (and no link to horses the Vikings are known to have taken as far as Greenland). The researchers looked for traces of DNA hailing from the horses that had lived in the Americas in the ice age or right after. They found none.

“We did their genomes, and they look Western in origin,” Orlando says. “Does that change the fact that the Lakota view the horses there today as theirs? No.” Nor should it, he adds: “I don’t want the world to conclude this is a genetic demonstration they had no relationship with the horse.”

Unusually for a scientific paper, this one acknowledges that some interpretive gaps among the authors remained unbridged—and it includes a statement from Lakota elders, several of whom are co-authors. “Horses have been part of us since long before other cultures came to our lands,” Lakota Chief Joe American Horse writes, “and we are a part of them.”

The paper leaves open a tantalizing possibility. DNA recovered from soil in the Arctic suggests horses might have survived until at least 5000 years ago in parts of North America, where people hunted them and fashioned their bones into tools. Perhaps the memory of that early relationship survived for millennia and is preserved in the oral tradition of the Lakota and other groups—who then reestablished a connection with domesticated horses in the past few centuries. “It would be crazy to dismiss this idea without testing it further,” Taylor says. “And now we can start to do that.” More radiocarbon dates and DNA, along with other methods, might even document an intersection between ancient horses and the Lakota and other groups, he says.

This Nokota mare is descended from horses that belonged to Sitting Bull, the 19th century Lakota leader who fought to defend a way of life that horses made possible. 
MARY KATHERINE MORRIS PHOTOGRAPHY/SACRED WAY SANCTUARY

Other tribes have very different oral traditions, some of which the new research reinforces. In Pawnee, Shield Chief Gover points out, the word for “horse” translates as “new dog.” Other Indigenous languages, too, reflect an initial unfamiliarity with the beasts: Blackfeet called them “elk dogs,” Comanche “magic dogs,” the Assiniboine “great dogs.” “Even in language, it shows up as ‘what is this?!’” Shield Chief Gover laughs. “Our oral traditions do not say we’ve always had horses. This is another piece of evidence that shows oral traditions were always correct, and archaeology’s catching up.”

One traditional Pawnee song, still sung by elders in the tribe today, tells of a long-ago encounter with a group of mounted outsiders in armor. “The song talks about people with metal, very foreign, who started a fight. We finished it, and took horses from them,” says Reed, who was not involved in the Science study. In 1540, as it happens, a Spanish conquistador named Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led a large expedition, including several hundred horses, north through New Mexico as far as what is now Kansas, where the Pawnee lived before they were pushed onto Oklahoma reservations. Based on Spanish accounts, the 1540 date had seemed too early for the Pawnee to have acquired horses—but the new study makes it conceivable. “This research verifies and solidifies our history, and that’s important,” Reed says.

Linguistic evidence reflects how rapidly and thoroughly the horse was incorporated into Native societies. When ethnographers wrote down Pawnee, Comanche, and other Native languages in the 1800s, the vocabularies included dozens of Indigenous terms for horse anatomy, tack, appearance, and breeding, along with extensive catalogs of plants used for equine veterinary care. Just a few centuries earlier, “not only did people have no experience with horses, they had no experience with any large animals,” at least domesticated ones, says Greger Larson, an Oxford geneticist who was not involved with the study. “It’s a real demonstration of the plasticity of humans.”

The flip side of the story is the speed with which the relationship was—almost—shattered once more. In the late 1800s, Plains tribes were stripped of their land and horses and prohibited from speaking their languages. Today the Pawnee, Comanche, and others are more likely to drive pickups than herd ponies.

To some co-authors of the new study, the results represent an opportunity to undo some of that loss. “Archaeological research can provide tangible history,” Shield Chief Gover says. “Horses are history that can be touched, which is uncommon for Indigenous people today.”










Traditional Native horse breeds like this curly haired horse from Nevada and her foal are kept at Sacred Way Sanctuary in Alabama. Researchers have found their ancestry is a mix of British and Spanish horses.
SACRED WAY SANCTUARY



ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Curry is a journalist in Berlin.