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> To point at a deer and call it a horse. When indigenous Mexicans first met Spaniards, they described their horses (which are not native to the New World, so
by School-Cotton 4y ago
> To point at a deer and call it a horse.
When indigenous Mexicans first met Spaniards, they described their horses (which are not native to the New World, so they had never seen before) as “a sort of giant deer”.
It’s totally off-topic here but I always thought that was interesting.
- dmix 4y agoThere were actually horses in the new world, it's just that the natives hunted them all to extinction well before the Europeans arrived. Likewise with most other "mega fuana" in North America. There's also theories that climate changes played a role in addition to over exploitation.
- School-Cotton 4y agoTrue, but to be clear, they had gone extinct thousands of years before the Spanish brought them back, so the natives in the early 16th century had no way of knowing about them.