Horse Sense, Whatever That Means
“Before we go on,” Bernie said, “a little controversy has broken out down below.”
“Down below?” said Lt. Stine. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Horses,” Bernie said. “The usual story is that horses went extinct in North America around 13,000 BC, which just happens to be when the first humans came over the Bering land bridge. See where I’m headed with this?”
“Nope,” said Lt. Stine. I was with him. I remembered a perp named Bering who we’d put away some time ago, but he’d been in a backroom poker game when we nabbed him, not on a bridge. I yawned, a nice big one.
“But now it turns out there’s a countervailing view,” Bernie said.
Lt. Stine blinked a few times. That always tells me that the human brain is getting overloaded – yes, it can happen. “Bernie?” he said. “Can we get back to the knife?”
This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 7:24 am and is filed under Chet The Dog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
2:44 am on June 5th, 2009
Wow – Bernie is right. One website maintains: "Fossils show that during the Ice Age horses lived on every continent except Australia. Great herds wandered throughout North and South America. Then for some unknown reason, horses disappeared from the Western Hemisphere." http://www.ponyclubvic.org.au/?Page=132
The Wikipedia says that man may have had something to do with the disappearance: "About 15,000 years ago Equus ferus was a widespread, holarctic species. Horse bones from this time period, the late Pleistocene, are found in Europe, Eurasia, Beringia, and North America. But by 10,000 years ago, the horse became extinct in North America and rare elsewhere. The reasons for this extinction are unknown, but at least in Alaska and Yukon, it was contemporary with human arrival."
Maybe humans were hungry!
The things I've learned from Bernie and Chet…
Boggles the mind!
3:34 am on June 5th, 2009
Hee hee hee! I love this blog!
3:36 am on June 5th, 2009
Who doesn't? While I don't often comment, I read it faithfully every day. LOVE Chet.
4:16 am on June 5th, 2009
What's a horse again? That isn't the black and white thing that stands out in the field is it? It's the other thing?
4:23 am on June 5th, 2009
Bernie should be a history professor. Except then Chet wouldn't be able to grab perps by the pant leg….Case closed.
11:58 am on June 5th, 2009
Yo, Bernie, if you get bored go visit Ron Ratkevich, another guy who loves the desert (and knows the desert well, if his academic credentials are any indication). And if that doesn't satisfy, also visit Dr. Claudia Notzke at the University of Lethbridge (they still allow dogs into Canada, right? WithOUT passports? Are there dog passports yet? There are horse passports! Yeah, really!). They will gently suggest not necessarily accepting the popular "horse extinction" story just because the fossil record is a bit, ah, spotty. In spots.