The first colonial horses of the Americas: the Iberian founding stock and what a 16th-century tooth from Haiti shows

Horses re-entered the Americas on Columbus's second voyage, landing at La Isabela on Hispaniola on 28 November 1493. The Caribbean became the breeding reservoir from which horses reached Mexico, Peru and Florida, and from which feral herds spread to the Great Plains. A tooth from Puerto Real in Haiti, from a layer laid down when the town was abandoned in 1578, has yielded the first complete mitochondrial genome of a post-Columbian horse in the hemisphere, and it reads as Iberian.