Prehistoric WI Eurasian steppe horses hunted to extinction instead of domesticated?
- Thread starter Salvador79
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That is true that no one knows, but my guess is that it will go as well as taming zebras.
I suspect that anything that would predate on medium sized game would at least try to predate on a donkey. Lions, hyenas, wolves, leopards etc.
yes pretty much at that time in Egypt wolves, stripped hyenas, leopards, lions and cheetahs, for foals, as well as spotted hyenas may have been an issue. Also Crocodiles for adults and foals, and jackals would go after the foals.
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An adult nile crocodile is more than capable of taking an adult donkey, do not relegate them to just foals
An adult crocodile is capable of taking down a wildebeest, never mind a donkey.
I should have put a comma and ment to add Crocodiles, yes they are more than capable of eating an adult ass
well, we know that people tried to domesticate onagers, struggled with them for generations, and then dropped them in a flash when they got horses. It might just be that onagers (and zebras) are one of those critters that don't tame easily, would require generations of being penned up and breeding for better traits, something not so easy for early cultures to do... maybe horses were just a lot easier...
this so much, we could have done it say in the 18th century but I honestly doubt that it could have happen then
The problem is they just arnt worth the effort unless we have no other options.
It's easier to breed better donkeys or camels than it is to domesticate zebra or oragers
this is true
on a side note this is what Egypt once had
Millennia ago, northern Africa was much wetter and cooler. Monsoons struck periodically, and the Sahara was covered with lakes and vegetation. This greener version of Egypt was home to a mix of wildlife more like the one now found in East Africa, with 37 species of large mammals including lions, wildebeest, warthogs and spotted hyenas.
Then about 150 years ago, as Egypt’s growing population became more industrialized, more species disappeared, including leopards and wild boar. Today, only 8 of the original 37 large-bodied mammals remain.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...6000-years-art-180952641/#5SO7IfAuU34irKlo.99
I´m considering to work, after I`ve finished my current TL "A Different Chalice", on a world map (or at least Eastern Hemisphere map) with a number of explanations based on what we`ve been discussing in this thread.
Here are some of the hypotheses I´ve drawn so far- please comment! - and a few yet totally open questions.
Hypotheses:
1.) The Eurasian steppes will be inhabited by sedentary agriculturalist urban societies along the rivers and by herders in the large spaces in-betweens. Cultural horizons will not spread as quickly across space ITTL as they did IOTL on this "continental cultural highway".
2.) Political, economic, military and cultural hegemony will remain, at least far into the 1st millennium BCE, with the long-established urban civilizational centres (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus-Ganges, Oxus, Yellow River), who experience longer continuity.
3.) Like OTL´s civilizational centres, they will be primarily caught in ongoing centre-periphery conflicts with surrounding herding and marginalised groups.
4.) From these civilizational centres and others, innovations like bronze-working, wheels, donkey-domestication, syllabic script, iron-working, minted currency, mills etc. will slowly disseminate.
5.) With them, cultural concepts will come to influence the periphery, e.g.:
a) a "Maat"-like worldview and attitudes towards the decesaed spreading from Egypt across Northern Africa and much of Europe
b) counter-cultural concepts to a), like that of Moses, following suit
c) something similar, with a few analogies to Vedic traditions but also clear divergences from it for which I´d draw on our knowledge about Southern Indian and Adivasi folk religion, developing in the fertile plains of the Indian subcontinent and spreading from there to South-East Asia
6.) Without Kurganised influences seeping in from the West, proto-Chinese chalcolithic civilization along the Yellow River doesn`t form into unified Chinese Kingdoms / Empires / Federations until much later. Instead, lots of warring (or not so warring) states.
7.) Generally, much less territorial states when compared to OTL, and much more political systems akin to OTL´s South-East Asian Mueang model: more powerful city states exercising hegemony over less powerful ones, in overlapping concentric circles on several levels. At the heart, powerful states like Egypt, alt-Akkad/Babylon, or alt-Northern India. On the outside, non-agriculturalist indigenous societies.
Open questions:
- religious developments
- order of technological innovations, plausible divergences and their effect on overall development
- major clashes between civilizational centres since when?
- discovery of the Americas? when and by whom? (Canaanite traders?)
Here are some of the hypotheses I´ve drawn so far- please comment! - and a few yet totally open questions.
Hypotheses:
1.) The Eurasian steppes will be inhabited by sedentary agriculturalist urban societies along the rivers and by herders in the large spaces in-betweens. Cultural horizons will not spread as quickly across space ITTL as they did IOTL on this "continental cultural highway".
2.) Political, economic, military and cultural hegemony will remain, at least far into the 1st millennium BCE, with the long-established urban civilizational centres (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus-Ganges, Oxus, Yellow River), who experience longer continuity.
3.) Like OTL´s civilizational centres, they will be primarily caught in ongoing centre-periphery conflicts with surrounding herding and marginalised groups.
4.) From these civilizational centres and others, innovations like bronze-working, wheels, donkey-domestication, syllabic script, iron-working, minted currency, mills etc. will slowly disseminate.
5.) With them, cultural concepts will come to influence the periphery, e.g.:
a) a "Maat"-like worldview and attitudes towards the decesaed spreading from Egypt across Northern Africa and much of Europe
b) counter-cultural concepts to a), like that of Moses, following suit
c) something similar, with a few analogies to Vedic traditions but also clear divergences from it for which I´d draw on our knowledge about Southern Indian and Adivasi folk religion, developing in the fertile plains of the Indian subcontinent and spreading from there to South-East Asia
6.) Without Kurganised influences seeping in from the West, proto-Chinese chalcolithic civilization along the Yellow River doesn`t form into unified Chinese Kingdoms / Empires / Federations until much later. Instead, lots of warring (or not so warring) states.
7.) Generally, much less territorial states when compared to OTL, and much more political systems akin to OTL´s South-East Asian Mueang model: more powerful city states exercising hegemony over less powerful ones, in overlapping concentric circles on several levels. At the heart, powerful states like Egypt, alt-Akkad/Babylon, or alt-Northern India. On the outside, non-agriculturalist indigenous societies.
Open questions:
- religious developments
- order of technological innovations, plausible divergences and their effect on overall development
- major clashes between civilizational centres since when?
- discovery of the Americas? when and by whom? (Canaanite traders?)
Agree totally with this. If you have a choice of onagers or nothing you settle for onagers. If you have a choice of onagers and horses you drop onagers and go for horses 100%.
If nobles have the choice of walking to war or riding then they will ride. If it takes a skilled charioteer to handle onagers then you settle for fewer chariots.
Only problem I have with this scenario: Mammoths or rhinoceroses hunted to extinction I could undestand, but horses ? Horses are far too versatile and numerous creatures than the aforementioned megafauna and also make for smaller, harder, speedier targets. The versatility of horses also made their adaptation to the changed, early Holocene climate, much more easier and less painful. (In contrast, the other herbivorous megafauna couldn't cope with a combination of the improving hunting techniques of humans and the massive changes in Eurasian and global climate within a relatively short timespan.
Um horses became extinct in the new world so it can indeed happen in Eurasia.
The horses in the New World and the ones in Eurasia are a rather different species. Additionally, horse distribution throughout the New World wasn't anywhere near as massive as in Eurasia. Unless you think Cromagnons will bother running around OTL Mongolia and southern Siberia, making sure they killed every horse, such an extinction is not going to happen easily. Even mammoths still survived (in isolation) around the time the Egyptians built the pyramids.)
You serious? I want to see the proof! That's a really neat piece of info!
The continental US to Central America is quite large and species large than equus equus to the size of a small dog were all hunted to extinction.
Wrangel Island is literally in northern Siberia, they eventually die out on their own. Regardless, their is precedent.