Another Horse Thread

[Victoria Silverwolf]

What if horses never vanished from the New World?

What if the Native Americans were very familiar with horses and the use of them at the time that Europeans arrived?

(Here's an interesting article on the hunting of New World horses in prehistoric times as a possible cause of extinction. Suppose this had not happened, and instead they were domesticated?)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/05/0511_ancienthorses.html

 

[Farnham]

Well, it makes the Native Americans more mobile. Faster reinforcement or shock cavalry charges makes quick work of conquistador landing parties and some of the smaller expeditions. The Europeans have guns and germs on their side, but horses make colonizing the New World more time consuming and expensive.

 

[Flocculencio]

Plus if the Native Americans have domesticated horses they'd be more likely to have epidemic diseases which would hit the colonists just as hard as smallpox etc. hit the natives.

 

[srv fan]

Besides the military/disease part, there are several other side effects that could be interesting.

What is the effect of tons of horses acting as a competitor on the bison population? There will probably be fewer. Perhaps a different mythology with less reverence for the bison will arise.

Could we see a New World Dark Age where the Mississipian civilizations, Iroquis, Inca, etc. are invaded and crushed by nomadic horsemen, as in the Old World? This is likely dependent on the New World developing compound bows (which I think they did, but not sure), and the stirrup (also not sure). I think this development is inevitable given enough time, but whether it happens before Columbus is another story.

 

[Flocculencio]

What is the effect of tons of horses acting as a competitor on the bison population? There will probably be fewer. Perhaps a different mythology with less reverence for the bison will arise.

But do horses and bison occupy the same ecological niche? You could argue that the vast herds of wildebeest in Africa were able to co-exist with large herds of zebra and antelope. Perhaps a similar coexistence would spring up between horses, bison and deer.

 

[Farnham]

They're few in number, but there are wild horses living in parts of the American West. Presuming they weren't hunted out of existence, I'm sure horses could co-exist with bison and deer somehow.

 

[Dave Howery]

I have to wonder if the new world horses could be domesticated... of all the equine species, we've only domesticated two of them... does the fact that the new world horses were indeed hunted to extinction perhaps mean that they were unsuitable for domestication?