Here's what I wrote a while back about Hun horse bones:
Hun Horse Bones and Book of Mormon Horses Book of Mormon defender Mike Ash
recently repeated the old argument that even though we know that the Huns had plenty of horses, "not a single usable horse bone has been found in the territory of the whole empire of the Huns. Based on the fact that other--once thriving--animals have disappeared (often with very little trace), it is not unreasonable to suggest that the same thing might have happened with the Nephite 'horse.'"
Ash's claim about Hun horse bones is unfortunately not accurate.
Here and
here are books that refer casually to Hun horse bone evidence.
Here is a report on a Hun horse find in Mongolia in 1990.
Ash's example is also problematic because bone evidence is not the only evidence we would expect to find in Mesoamerica if horses had been domesticated there. There have been a large number of human cultural artifacts relating to horses found in Hunnic lands. There are a great many
saddles, harnesses, and whips in their burials and funeral offerings, for example. In fact, wherever horses have been domesticated, they have always left their mark on art and material culture. That is because horses gave a tremendous military and economic advantage to the civilizations that mastered them. Yet in Mesoamerica, although we have a great deal of art, including vast numbers of animal representations, horses are not depicted. We find no saddles, no bridles, and no chariot wheels.
Additionally, it should be noted that some historians have called into question how many horses the Huns actually brought with them into Europe. The climate and food supplies in Eastern Europe were not as well-suited to large numbers of horses as the Asian steppes. According to the
Encyclopedia Brittanica,
[Attila's] Huns had become a sedentary nation and were no longer the horse nomads of the earlier days. The Great Hungarian Plain did not offer as much room as the steppes of Asia for grazing horses, and the Huns were forced to develop an infantry to supplement their now much smaller cavalry. As one leading authority has recently said, "When the Huns first appeared on the steppe north of the Black Sea, they were nomads and most of them may have been mounted warriors. In Europe, however, they could graze only a fraction of their former horse power, and their chiefs soon fielded armies which resembled the sedentary forces of Rome."
So, if there is less evidence of Hun horses during this period in Europe than we would expect, it may well be because the Huns of the region actually did not have as large a number of horses as commonly thought. Indeed, one source suggests that Europe's Great Hungarian plain could have supported no more than 20,000.
And finally, it's worth adding that the period of Hun rule was quite short compared to the several-thousand-year lacuna of horse evidence in the Americas from the generally-accepted Paleolithic extinction date to the time of alleged domestication by Book of Mormon peoples. Even if the Hun period had been a true lacuna-- which it is not-- it wouldn't really have been comparable to the situation in the Americas.