WI: Horses go extinct during the Middle Miocene Disruption

Plus-Sized Scribe

Plus-Sized Scribe

What animals would be best poised to take their place, do you guys reckon?

Well, if we look at the Great American Interchange, we see that horse-like notoungulates lived in South America. Could they perhaps take the niche once inhabited by true horses in time? But what about elsewhere in the world? What animals are prime candidates there?
 
Plus-Sized Scribe

Plus-Sized Scribe

Let me clarify: by horses, I mean Equidae as a whole.

And also, donkeys are domesticated from wild asses. So with no horses to give rise to the asses in the first place... :cool:
 

wtw

Arthe said:
Camel.....
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Oxen, water buffaloes, yaks, reindeer, various other deer spieces. We will eventually domesticate elk and moose, possibly even bison. It will be hell on large carnivores though, we would have to kill them like there was no tomorrow.
 

Tocomocho

This seems unlikely a priori. The Miocene was a period of cooling and grassland expansion, in other words, Horse Heaven. It is from the Pliocene when you see horses becoming displaced by ungulates* like deer and bovids. In fact, a quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that the main victims of this disruption were reptiles in northern regions.

That being said, you could have horses disappearing because whatever at any time. We have discussed previously the extinction of the modern horse species alone in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition (when its range contracted severely, actually) which prompted answers like it'd be replaced in human civilization by donkeys and/or camels. Your timeframe presumes that the entire horse lineage goes extinct well before that, so we wouldn't have donkeys either. Nor onagers, nor zebras. No equids at all.

So, without equids, what evolves to take the horses' niches in the Miocene (reduced severely in the following periods)? Well, you could look at what else was having a golden age in North America in the Miocene along with horses. That else is camel(id)s and distant relatives of them like the Protoceratids that include the famous Synthetoceras. This last group was made of grazing, somewhat horse-like runners already. Without horses, do these guys have a shot of surviving the arrival of the ungulates*, coexist with them in the limited roles occupied by modern equids IOTL and migrate west to colonize Afroeurasia (which they didn't IOTL)? Yes? No? Does an entirely new branch of running camels appear and do it instead?

And would any of these guys lend themselves to human domestication and riding? These are entirely different questions. Even with real equids, we do have species that have been domesticated (horse, donkey), and species that were not and are reputed untameable (zebras, onagers). You could end with a different descendant of Synthetoceras in each of their places and none of them being domesticable by humans.

*EDIT: I meant to type ruminants.
 
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Tripwire

I know this doesn't fit the thread premise, but I was wondering recently what would have happened in an ATL where horses went extinct during the Holocene, but donkeys were domesticated as usual. Would we see breeding of larger and larger donkeys? Right now, there are a few modern donkey breeds, such as the Mammoth Jack breed, that are large enough for riding. I assume they could be bred in ancient times as well. But unfortunately I don't know enough about equids to know what the exact fundamental differences between donkeys and horses are. Donkeys don't seem to be able to run nearly as fast, though, even if they're fairly large. But even if they wouldn't make effective calvary, riding donkeys would still be an advantage just in carrying things.

On the other hand if the whole Equus genus was wiped out, I'd imagine camels would take more of the place of horses as weapons of war. Maybe war elephants would be much more common too.
 
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Tripwire

BigDave1967 said:
Humans would be riding domesticated deer or cows.
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No we wouldn't. Deer were undomesticable due to their ability to jump out of confinement, and cattle are too slow and don't seem to take well to riders anyway. They can pull things well, though.

Edit: it occurs to me that without horses we'd see a lot more use of dog-pulled sledges and the like.
 
Dorozhand

Dorozhand

Banned
The Old Ones have no reason to abandon such useful creatures, especially seen as how they are so tractable. This is an era before the great freezing during which the Antarctic was flourishing and grasslands were expanding.

The troubles later on had not yet begun and, though the saurians were dead elsewhere, they were still being used in the austral lands. That being said, one thing I can think of is the equine taxa developing some kind of intelligence. Given that the saurians served as good beasts of burden already, and the Shoggoths had long been kept in check, any kind of threat from horses will be met with extermination given their ready replacements.
 

Maur

Banned
The Chimera Virus said:
What animals would be best poised to take their place, do you guys reckon?

Well, if we look at the Great American Interchange, we see that horse-like notoungulates lived in South America. Could they perhaps take the niche once inhabited by true horses in time? But what about elsewhere in the world? What animals are prime candidates there?
Click to expand...
What place? Horses are used for variety of things, and different animals would be fit to take different roles they serve (some well, some not so well)

Somewhat surprisingly, i would say that lack of horses benefit civilization as a whole (thats why i shake my head at the idea of introducing horses to NA and then boom, Natives advance rapidly)
 

phildup

There were large members of the Llama family in the Americas, this one survived the interchange

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“Macrauchenia had a somewhat camel-like body, with sturdy legs, a long neck and a relatively small head. Its feet, however, more closely resembled those of a modern rhinoceros, and had three hoofs each. It was a relatively large animal, with a body length of around 3 metres (9.8 ft) and a weight up to 1042 kg.”
“One insight into Macrauchenia's habits is that its ankle joints and shin bones may indicate that it was adapted to have unusually good mobility, being able to rapidly change direction when it ran at high speed.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrauchenia
 
Russian

Russian

Well, the POD might be horses being untamable like zebras or something like that.

Maur said:
Somewhat surprisingly, i would say that lack of horses benefit civilization as a whole (thats why i shake my head at the idea of introducing horses to NA and then boom, Natives advance rapidly)
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Ye, I tend to agree with that.
In agriculture the horses could be substituted by cattle or something like that.
But there is no substitute to horses in warfare. And here are the possible consequences -
- no Indo-Arian migration which might result in uninterrupted existence of Indo-Harrapan civilization and Ashan civilization in Iran and some other old cultures that were (supposedly) swept away by horse-driven chariots of wild Arians.
- no Scythian/Saka/Sarmatian wild nomads invasions might save us a couple of other old civilizations
- no Hun invasion might save the West Roman Empire
- the Turkish nomads pretty much devastated Iran, Irak and some other regions and their atrocities were forgotten only because of the Mongols
- and on top of that we have the Mongol invasion which caused the same harm to the civilization on the Earth as a big meteorite / comet fall might have caused.

Nothing of the above would have happened without the horse.

So the lack of horse might have resulted in human civilization reaching the level of today five hundred years ago or even before.
 

mojojojo

Gone Fishin'
Tocomocho said:
This seems unlikely a priori. The Miocene was a period of cooling and grassland expansion, in other words, Horse Heaven. It is from the Pliocene when you see horses becoming displaced by ungulates* like deer and bovids. In fact, a quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that the main victims of this disruption were reptiles in northern regions.

That being said, you could have horses disappearing because whatever at any time. We have discussed previously the extinction of the modern horse species alone in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition (when its range contracted severely, actually) which prompted answers like it'd be replaced in human civilization by donkeys and/or camels. Your timeframe presumes that the entire horse lineage goes extinct well before that, so we wouldn't have donkeys either. Nor onagers, nor zebras. No equids at all.

So, without equids, what evolves to take the horses' niches in the Miocene (reduced severely in the following periods)? Well, you could look at what else was having a golden age in North America in the Miocene along with horses. That else is camel(id)s and distant relatives of them like the Protoceratids that include the famous Synthetoceras. This last group was made of grazing, somewhat horse-like runners already. Without horses, do these guys have a shot of surviving the arrival of the ungulates*, coexist with them in the limited roles occupied by modern equids IOTL and migrate west to colonize Afroeurasia (which they didn't IOTL)? Yes? No? Does an entirely new branch of running camels appear and do it instead?

And would any of these guys lend themselves to human domestication and riding? These are entirely different questions. Even with real equids, we do have species that have been domesticated (horse, donkey), and species that were not and are reputed untameable (zebras, onagers). You could end with a different descendant of Synthetoceras in each of their places and none of them being domesticable by humans.

*EDIT: I meant to type ruminants.
Click to expand...
Would such a change butterfly away the evolution of humanity?
 
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