Top 7 mind-blowing facts about horse history: A 19th century horse named Old Billy lived to the ripe of 62. Horses have lived on planet earth for 50 million years. During the entirety of that time, they’ve never been able to vomit but produce about 10 gallons of saliva per day. This is the first known ancestor of the horse. It’s called Eohippus. Eohippus had four padded toes on the front legs and three padded toes on the back legs. Horses, however, are ungulates, which means they are mammals with hooves. Everybody knows that horses weren't domesticated until around 3500 BC. But it is a little know fact that horses originated in North America and then migrated to Europe and Asia. The remaining North American horses eventually all died off and were only reintroduced to north American by European colonizers. The highest jumping horse can jump slightly higher than the highest jumping human. The world record for the highest jump made by a horse is 8 feet, 1 and 1/4 inches on February 5th, 1949 in Vina del Mar, Chile. The horses name was Huaso. Javier Sotamayor, of Cuba, is the highest jumping human, who in July of 1993, jumped 8 feet and 1 half inch. Horses were once primarily used for meat and milk. In fact, thought it’s not precisely known when in history humans discovered that they can convert food into alcohol through a process of fermentation, a strong argument can be made that first distilled spirits were horse-milk brandies, whose alcohol was separated not through heat distillation but through cold distillation -- which is to say, by freezing water out of the fermented horse milk during those long Mongolian winters. There is such a thing as a miniature horse. It is a real horse. They are gentle and friendly. They like to be outdoors. Miniature horses are not the same thing as a ponies. But they were once used in coal mines because the tunnels are too small for regular horses, and here in the mines they were indeed called pit ponies. Pit ponies were used for mining until about 1950. The biggest horse in recorded history is probably Shire, whose original name was Sampson. His name was changed to Mammoth. He was 21.2 hands high, which is approximately this big.
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