The domestic horse did not exist in the Americas before the Spanish came, and if these bones should prove to belong to an animal introduced by Europeans, all our conclusions on our previous work were wrong. Though I was willing to swear that 400 years was all too short a time to account for all the material we had uncovered, those horse bones gave us momentarily something of a shock. The only alternative was that they belonged to a prehistoric relative of the common horse. This ancient horse was known to live in South America in times long past, but so far as I knew no more had proved that it still existed when even the earliest people lived here. Without special training in palaeontology it was not for me to identify these bones, but it was apparent that they were of smaller, stockier animals than those used in Patagonia today. Later examination proved that we had found the first evidence that this ancient horse was hunted and eaten by the early natives of South America.

Further clearing exposed fire pits from which many fragments of burned and charred bones were taken. In one of these was a handful of small one pellets about the size of peas which could have come from only one animal, the ground sloths.