Wade Miller is an emeritus professor of vertebrate paleontology formerly on the BYU Geology faculty. He spent many years working on the collection of remains recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. Rosario Gómez-Núñez is one of the foremost paleontologists in Mexico. She is affiliated with the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo, Coahuila. Miller and Gómez-Núñez have spent decades working together on fossil sites throughout Mexico. They have presented their findings at academic conferences worldwide. One of the most common animal remains they recover from their digs is the horse, primarily Equus conversidens or the larger Equus mexicanus. When I visited her at the Museo del Desierto in 2018 she said her team had excavated dozens of paleontology sites and never failed to find horse bones.
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| Rosario Gómez-Núñez in her lab at the Museo del Desierto Photo by Kirk Magleby, April 27, 2018 |
In 2017, Wade Miller approached me with the tantalizing news that a major repository of horse bones had been located at Rancho Carabanchel near Cedral, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. There was enough material there that a robust stratigraphy was possible. Could Book of Mormon Central help fund research expeditions and Carbon-14 tests on recovered samples? Yes.
After a handful of expeditions and a couple dozen C-14 tests, Equus remains in stratigraphic layers closely associated with charcoal and other datable organics were coming in with dates in Book of Mormon times (2,500 BC to AD 400). None of the horse bones could be directly dated. They were too desiccated with too little collagen remaining for accelerated mass spectrometry (C-14) labs to work with. After more expeditions and more C-14 tests, the Rancho Carabanchel stratigraphy was well established. It was time to publish and a paper was co-authored by Wade Miller, Rosario Gómez-Núñez, Jim Mead of the Mammoth Site in South Dakota and the University of Arizona, Gilberto Pérez-Roldán of the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosi, Jorge Madrazo-Fanti of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, and Isaí Ortiz-Pérez of the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosi. Submitting it to high impact paleontology journals, it was rejected 4 times. This was paradigm-shifting. Pre-Columbian horses in Holocene Mexico? That would change the conventional wisdom that had prevailed in scientific circles for generations. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The Rancho Carabanchel material was dated stratigraphically by close association (often as close as 1 or 2 centimeters from datable organics), but not directly. Peer reviewers at prestigious journals cited that as a deficiency in the data, although they found no fault with the project methodology and some noted that vertebrate remains are often not datable due to lack of preserved soft tissue.
In 2021, the paper was presented at a session of the Geological Society of America conference in Portland, Oregon and an abstract was published. Then in 2022, the Texas Journal of Science accepted the paper and it was published on October 12, 2022. On October 17, 2022 Book of Mormon Central published an essay about horses in Book of Mormon times that references the Texas Journal of Science article. Later that day, a video went up on YouTube.
The Spanish YouTube video followed a few hours later.There is a convergence of data from several sources and multiple disciplines all pointing to post-Pleistocene survival of Equus in America. That bodes well for the Book of Mormon and its mention of horses among the Jaredites, Nephites, and Lamanites.