According to Peru Prehistoric Horse Most Complete in Americas, horses existed in the Americas before the Spanish brought them — but they went extinct 10,000 years ago:
Peruvian geologists have discovered the most complete horse fossil in the Americas, a reminder that the hoofed mammal existed in the New World long before the Spanish brought horses in the 1500s.“Horses were reintroduced to South America. With this (find) we hope to remind people this animal did exist here, but died out some 10,000 years ago,” Rodolfo Salas, head of Peru’s Natural History Museum’s paleontology department, said on Friday.
A team from the museum discovered the preserved skeleton of an Equus (Amerihippus) santaeelenae in July 2002 in the arid department of Arequipa, some 600 miles south of Lima.
So did early American humans hunt them to extinction?