Horses become extinct

reformer

So lets say horses die off in the early days of the human race before they are cultivated. How could civilizaiton progress?
 

Max Sinister

Banned
Slow, very slow, if at all. No horses -> no chariots -> no streets -> no large empires -> too many changes to mention.
 

King Gorilla

Camels and Donkeys are eventually used as substitute beasts of burden but I would imagine that overall human development would be much slower.
 

Dave Howery

this topic has been discussed before. Cattle are a widely available substitute for a lot of the roles that horses filled... plowing, freighting, everyday riding... not so good for chariots or fast transport though... some aspects of civilization wouldn't be hampered at all, others would...
 

arctic warrior

Why are horses seen as so essential to civilization?
As already mentioned you could substitute the working power of horses with camel, donkey, cattle/oxe and dogs! You'd still need roads to travel over land and inside your city dwellings, but sea/river transport would be of greater importance. This would still mean the wheel being developed for transportation and perhaps earlier invention of other means of getting more speedy road transport. Earlier steam engines for one.
Of course you wouldn't have the cavalry formations of earlier warfare and the horsed peoples of Central Asia and Arabia, but that could make for some interesting change.
So a speedlimit on overland travel before the clearing of forest in iron age/medieval times, but then forest was in itself a limit on larger horsed formations being it armies or peoples.
Is speedy warfare the expression of civilization? I remember having read that the Roman republic had to rely on allies, especially Gaul for good cavalry.
Speedy signals/postal services could be achieved by other means - runners for one - inca's. Fires and other visual signals another...
 

zoomar

I don't see the absence of domesticable horses affecting the speed of cultural evolution very much at all, as long as other ungulates (cattle pigs, and camels particularly) are still available. Plow agriculture, metalurgy, urbanization, complex state-level societies, etc would evolve anyway. Possibly, the absence of horse-like animals which could be ridden would affect military strategies, but a sophisticated state-level society could implement semaphore systems to transmit messages as quickly as equestrian couriers.

The main effect might be the absence of equestrian nomads and pastoralists between civilization centers, perhaps affecting the spread/diffusion of cultural innovations.
 

Max Sinister

Banned
Oxen are slower than horses, donkeys and camels have a worse temper, and dogs aren't as good as horses either, because you can't ride them.

Civilization might still develop, but slower.
 

Lordkraken

Civilization would definitely still develop (it did in the Americas after all, where there were no horses until after the Europeans arrived), but I think that rigid social structures would be less likely todevelop. The entire Noble class of Europe during the Middle ages was based on mounted warfare after all, and people couldn't ascend to a higher social class becausethey couldn't afford to buy or look after a charger, and were therefore useless to the kings.
 
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Max Sinister

Banned
The Inca was the absolutist ruler of Tawantinsuya, long before European kings had comparable power. And he was the head of religion too.
 

Tocomocho

Max Sinister said:
Oxen are slower than horses, donkeys and camels have a worse temper, and dogs aren't as good as horses either, because you can't ride them.

Civilization might still develop, but slower.
Click to expand...

The horse become extinct in North Africa and the Middle East around the same time that in the Americas. However, that never stopped the development of the Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations. The Egyptians were the first who domesticated the donkey and the Sumerians built chariots pulled by onagers (until this day, this is the only known epoch when these "untameable" animals were domesticated in some form). In my opinion, there is none reason to think that the donkey would be harder to breed for new races than the horses. Even the tranquil and giant draft horses of some European races are descendants of tiny, fast and also bad-tempered savage tarpans.

Obviously, the horse triumphed above the donkey in OTL. But that was only because the horse is faster than the donkey. In absense of horses, people could turn to the donkeys and create faster breeds through generations. There were some races of "running donkeys" in the 19th century that were used in hippodromes. Nothing as fast as horses, but if you think that they were only breeded with this target very lately and only for fun, you would realise that through millenia the results of such breeding would be amazing.
 

arctic warrior

Tocomocho said:
The horse become extinct in North Africa and the Middle East around the same time that in the Americas. However, that never stopped the development of the Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations. The Egyptians were the first who domesticated the donkey and the Sumerians built chariots pulled by onagers (until this day, this is the only known epoch when these "untameable" animals were domesticated in some form). In my opinion, there is none reason to think that the donkey would be harder to breed for new races than the horses. Even the tranquil and giant draft horses of some European races are descendants of tiny, fast and also bad-tempered savage tarpans.

Obviously, the horse triumphed above the donkey in OTL. But that was only because the horse is faster than the donkey. In absense of horses, people could turn to the donkeys and create faster breeds through generations. There were some races of "running donkeys" in the 19th century that were used in hippodromes. Nothing as fast as horses, but if you think that they were only breeded with this target very lately and only for fun, you would realise that through millenia the results of such breeding would be amazing.
Click to expand...

Exactly my point too.
Dogs are good in an arctic environment and fast, but of course you can't ride them. They were also utilized by native americans to pull small travois. They are limited in single use and have their strength in pack's! Reindeer/caribou are also used in this way in near arctic areas.
You can ride moose or reindeer/caribou, and that would make for some interesting Sami cav... But really the question is on civilization evolving without horses and you seems to focus on land travel. Sea travel would be important as it was OTL and rivers can be utilized in summer by boat and in winter, in the north, by sleigh pulled by dogs or reindeer/caribou over the frozen rivers.
So there are alternatives to horses in farming, even if this would slow down things in Northern Europe, reducing the outcome because of lack of sufficient draugth animals.
 

Tocomocho

arctic warrior said:
So there are alternatives to horses in farming, even if this would slow down things in Northern Europe, reducing the outcome because of lack of sufficient draugth animals.
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There are still the oxen. In fact, the horse was a bad animal for plowing untill a Chinese invented the horse collar.
 

arctic warrior

Tocomocho said:
There are still the oxen. In fact, the horse was a bad animal for plowing untill a Chinese invented the horse collar.
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Problem seems to have been, that the change from roman 2 field useage, where one field is planted with crops and the other rest for fertilizing by grazing animals, to 3 or 4 field in northern Europe during Medieval time decreased the area left for grazing considerably and made peasents dependent on horses. The Chinese invention of the horse collar was indeed what was needed. Seems that horses needs less pasture for grazing than oxen??? I'm not an expert on this but that was my interpetation.
 

Hendryk

Banned
From a Chinese perspective, horses were a mixed blessing. I may be going out on a limb here, but I think Chinese civilization would have flourished without horses as well as with them, since its basis is intensive irrigated agriculture, for which horses are of little use--oxen and water buffaloes are better for plowing fields. Horses, in fact, were a key asset of the enemies of China, the nomadic cultures of central and north Asia that periodically invaded the Empire and occasionally founded ruling dynasties of their own. Without the Xiongnu, Mongols, Manchus, etc., to threaten their eastern and northern frontiers, the Chinese may well have grown even more powerful than in OTL.

Besides, the Chinese had camels handy for long-distance overland travel, so even the Silk Road would be around.
 

Tom Veil

Easy part: up until 1492, life in the Americas will be 100% identical (unless, of course, the Vikings/Phoencians/etc really did visit America).

Still easy: Civilization will still emerge at roughly the same time as OTL in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, followed at the usual gaps by India, Persia, Ethiopia, and Greece.

Fairly confident: The fields will still be plowed; cities will still have paths, and later stone, brick, and gravel streets. Trade and intercultural contacts will be much lessened, especially outside the natural range of camels (basically, the OTL Muslim world, minus Indonesia, plus Tibet). Outside of China, great Empires will be maritime.
 

Fire God

So without horses and therefore chariots, what is the likelyhood of an Indo-European migration? Would they be staying in Central Asia and Ukraine or span outward in a very limited range?
 

arctic warrior

RahXephon said:
So without horses and therefore chariots, what is the likelyhood of an Indo-European migration? Would they be staying in Central Asia and Ukraine or span outward in a very limited range?
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Even without horses the Sumerians DID, as already stated have onager pulled chariots!
If part of the reasons for Indo-European migration, the major weather changes happening around the end of the late bronze-age still takes place, then yes they will happen. Not as fast as OTL but still. The result could still be devasteting for the Middle East civilizations. Another factor could be overpopulation, which would still happen.
 

Tocomocho

RahXephon said:
So without horses and therefore chariots, what is the likelyhood of an Indo-European migration? Would they be staying in Central Asia and Ukraine or span outward in a very limited range?
Click to expand...

Even if they don't domesticate a substitute for the horse (like the Persian onager, that at that time also existed in the European part of Russia) they still have the advantage of iron metalworking in a time when there were parts of Europe still in a stone age level. That means perhaps slower Indoeuropean migrations, but with the same final range that OTL.
 

Michael B

Tocomocho said:
Even if they don't domesticate a substitute for the horse (like the Persian onager, that at that time also existed in the European part of Russia).
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Of course they could end up importing onagers the way the dwellers of the Near East and North America did horses, ie someone else bring them in and some are captured or get lose and rounded up by natives.
 
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