I like being in the realms of facts and precedent too. The trouble if you're going to talk about facts and precedent, you need actually present some, instead of just spouting your own opinions. So far, we've seen evidence that donkeys can be successfully used as mounts, and for pulling chariots and similar objects, but we haven't heard anything like that from you. All we've heard is repetition of the same few lines about how African cattle pastoralists didn't do this, and how donkeys were viewed as "women's animals" without the prestige of cattle. You haven't even tried to show that these attitudes were universal, or why someone on the Eurasian steppe, or the North China Plain, or pretty much anywhere else in Eurasia would care about what the Africans thought of the animal. You've just insisted that it would never happen and it would be bad, anyway. The one piece of evidence you do bring up, in this post, cuts completely against your argument by showing that different cultures are open to using animals in different ways, and therefore it is not implausible that some group in Eurasia experiments with donkeys pulling war-carts or even with riding them, hence, as Balaur says, undermining your whole argument (such as it is).
Prehistoric WI Eurasian steppe horses hunted to extinction instead of domesticated?
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I'm curious how much slower it would be actually. Without horses maximum transport speeds will almost certainly be cut but it's possible that depending on the donkey/horse ratio used in OTL, average transport speed might not drop that much.
Also, I found an interesting study attempting to introduce donkeys to farmers in Tanzania and the advantages/disadvantages compared to oxen. http://www.atnesa.org/donkeys/donkeys-ngendello-sukumaland-TZ.pdf
uh... really? I always had the idea that most mounts (and working animals) were geldings, back in the days when horses were the way to get around. Stallions are big, but have a lot of issues... they get surly around other stallions (and even geldings) and damn near unmanageable when around mares in heat. Mares are usable most of the time, but there is that every-so-often when they are in season, and they get to be hard to work with. Geldings have none of those problems...
I believe using geldings only became the standard for armies in the 1800s. Before that stallions were often the preferred warhorses because they considered more spirited, aggressive, and suited for battle despite any of the associated difficulties in using them. But it's never prevented people from using geldings in battle.
I presume that the donkeys in question use horse collars. If not then you get more traction from the oxen.
Figure 3 in the paper it indicates that one of the disadvantages to donkeys in 90s Tanzania is that the locals didn't have much experience with donkeys and that "proper yoking practices are absent". Which is probably part of the reason they continued to use oxen for plowing as you said. However the conclusion indicates that for transporting smaller loads or longer distance or over poorer roads the donkey would be superior.
It doesn't go against what I said, I've been interweaving Googleable information in my posts.
There is a long history of animals not being mounts until the introduction of the horse.
In Saudi Arabia and Somalia until very recently camel were not ridden, Somali a relative of the Rendille mentioned early only adopted Camel mounts as a response to Calvary.
The Camel and the Wheel talks about the Central Asian/Eurasian Steepe horse husbandry that created everything we associate with mounts.
https://books.google.com/books?id=V...SAhVL1WMKHeKoD2kQ6AEITzAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false
There is a trickle effect that occurred because of the horse, the use of onager came after the domestication of horse further north as was the camel. The horse and society centered around horse brought wheeled transport, the first saddles, bridles, etc...
This is common knowledge.
Take away the horse and you butterfly away the technology developed in horse society.
See, this is the kind of post you should have made in the first place. Here you have provided specific claims, with a source (albeit one too long and forbidden by Google to closely peruse), for why donkey-riding might not develop--riding animals tended to derive from exposure to riding horses, and donkeys were less suitable than other animals for being ridden without prior experience showing that equids could be ridden. It still doesn't explain why they wouldn't be used in chariotry, but it does provide a reasonable explanation for why you believe that donkeys would not ever be a riding animal.
However, I still believe it's quite a leap to say that this simply could not happen. I believe the speculation here is now centering on the idea that the steppe peoples--who, after all, invented the idea in the first place--would similarly invent the idea in an ATL, since mobility would be very much more important to them than other peoples, and using carts or wagons pulled by some kind of animal would help them, just as it did IOTL. This could then inspire others to experiment with riding their own animals, which could very well include donkeys given a lack of (many) other rideable animals and the utility of larger (that is, riding-sized) donkeys for carrying loads. Do you not think this is plausible, and why not?
The formation of horse technology and techniques of horse mobility came from a deep and embedded cultural economy centered around the horse. There were NO other animals and riding is believed to be linked to the hunting of other horses.
The donkey was auxiliary, the main use of Donkey came after cow. The hunting of animals where the Donkey was at was secondary to cow dairy and kreb harvesting.
This is what I've been saying this whole time.
Wild horse herds cluster tight, a hunter on a mount could slip into a herd close by and attack at close range. The donkey is very different than horse in this regard, it doesn't cluster and rely on loud braying to stay in contact with one another and unlike the Eurasian steepes with limited faunal diversity Donkey were one of many beasts.
In my idea, the steppes had nothing to do with it-the Sumerians simply continue to use their Onager chariots and improve on them over time, with the onagers eventually being replaced with east African donkeys, and then chariots falling out of use once donkeys get big enough and some smart alec figures out it's easier to cut out the middleman and ride the things rather than cart a chariot around in boggy or mountainous terrain. Soldiers fighting in difficult circumstances tend to be quite good at modifying their kit in creative ways.
Sumerians had carts and wagons pulled by onagers, but no war chariots. I doubt that they would ever come up with that idea, for the reasons Revachah has pointed out. War chariots came to that region from the North. Without horses in the steppe, it won`t come from the North for a long while, and I wonder whether it will come from anywhere else.
I agree with Revachah that horse riding came from horse hunting. Doesn`t mean, though, as Workable Goblin pointed out, that, once either donkeys or camels reach the Eurasian steppes, they won`t be ridden. As you pointed out yourself, riding animals occurred in many places separately from horse culture. That`s not the same as assuming that everything we did that was related to the horse would have come about in an ATL only with other animals, here I totally agree with you.
Riding donkeys is a completely different experience from riding horses. It won`t lead to the same cultural and technological results that riding horses did, even though that`s biologically not impossible. But it will change things considerably nonetheless.
I believe in creative soldiers, too, but I still think asinary is not going to happen, while donkey-chariot warfare might, and so might elephant-chariot warfare, and donkey-mounted infantry. Problem is, it´s not going to develop in places where donkeys aren`t ridden usually: If you`re stuck between a rock and a hard place on a battlefield and you can`t flee with your donkey-chariot, you`d much rather flee by foot than by riding your donkey because your donkey isn`t bred for speed, it´s bred for strength and endurance. Now, if steppe peoples begin riding their donkeys because they want the oversight and they need to move around a lot whilst not having to cart around stuff all the time, that`s a different piece of cake because they might breed their donkeys for (more) speed (albeit maybe not the speed of horses since that whole idea would not be in their cultural imagination). Using them in mounted warfare is still not going to become a big thing, but at least these donkeys wouldn`t be super-slow.
The Ur standard, from the 26th century BC, shows four wheeled chariots pulled by what look an awful lot like onagers. They have warriors armed with a variety of weapons riding on them.
I'm thinking something more along the lines of "well, we can't take chariots into the mountains, but I'm a noble and I can't footslog, and we've been loading wounded men onto pack donkeys for ages so..." for riding. It would certainly take awhile, but I could see it happening.
For actual Asinary, the best role for them would be as mounted archers. Sure, they're slower than horses, but they'd still be the fastest thing on the battlefield, and that's all they need to avoid close combat.
Optical_Illusion
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I would say personally, I think there's a difference between my thinking here and yours, which I would take issue with in that here you see the wheel as a horse centered technology, which required the horse, and otherwise you're not going to get it. But I would see it as a pastoralist technology that is useful for wagons. One that is going to develop on steppe-grassland and more broadly any area of the world where an optimal mode of subsistance includes herding over large areas, whatever the beast of burden is that they have, ox or horse. Likewise the yoke.
The wheel doesn't strictly seem to travel with horse based society either - evidence for wheels and the use of carts / wagons is present in the TRB (Funnelbeaker) culture, who did not seem to have the horse.
Some excerpts from David Anthony on the earliest wagons and wheels in "The Horse, the Wheel and Language" (https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0FDqf415wqgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false) p72 onwards -
"The earliest wagons were slow and clumsy, and probably required teams of specially trained oxen" (not horses)
"Wagons were useful in a different way in the open grasslands of the steppes, where the economy depended more on herding than on agriculture. Here wagons made portable things that had never been portable in bulk - shelter, water and food. Herders who had always lived in the forested river valleys and grazed their herds timidly on the edges of the steppes now could take their tents, water and food supplies to distant pastures far from the river valleys ... Again this permitted the dispersal of communities".
"Andrew Sherrat bundled the invention of the wheel together with the invention of the plow, wool sheep, dairying and the beginning of horse transport to explain a sweeping ste of change that occured among European societies about 3500 -3000 BCE" (as the Secondary Products Revolution) ... "In Sherrat's view, all of them were derived by diffusion from the civilizations of the Near East " ... "But Sherrat's proposal that all of these innovations came from the Near East and entered Europe about the same time quickly fell apart. Scratch plows and dairying appeared in Europe long before 3500 BCE and horse domestication was a local event in the steppes. An important fragment of the SPR survives in the conjoined diffusion of wool sheep and wagons across much of the ancient Near East and Europe between 3500 and 3000 BCE, but we do not know where either of these innovations started". (i.e. the wheel and wagons are *not* clearly an innovation from "society centered around horses").
"Most specialists asssume that the earliest wagons were produced in Mesopotamia, which was urban and therefore more sophisticated than the tribal societies of Europe; indeed Mesopotamia had sledges that served as prototypes. But we really don't know".
(Skipped over the section in which he describes how wagons and wheels were useful in more sedentary agricultural based societies in Europe that were contemporary with the earliest horse domesticating societies of the steppe at that time).
Now all this said, riding, though is another thing which seems less inevitable. I would think it happen at some point whether the domesticate is a horse or another equid or camelid, but it might happen later in history and they might have to breed for it and fallen upon it as an extension of breeding animals which were stronger, larger and more suited to pull wagons, carts and plows (which changes the dynamics quite a bit).
I think it could be said that natural human curiosity would lead to someone trying to ride an animal they were in close contact with - children jumping onto domesticated oxen, for example. From there, it doesn't seem too great a leap to trying to ride a donkey, without the need for the horse as an example.
(is there any evidence of Incas ever riding llamas? Even as children?)
I'm curious though, if the original domesticators of donkeys didn't ride them, what were they used for?
(is there any evidence of Incas ever riding llamas? Even as children?)
I'm curious though, if the original domesticators of donkeys didn't ride them, what were they used for?
Pulling carts, possibly ploughs, carrying loads, milking. They're a very useful "utility" animal, basically.
Im not following your speed based arguments, they don't make sense, donkeys are still faster than people, no one is going to flee on foot if riding a donkey or chariot is an option just because the donkeys are not as fast as an animal that doesn't exist in their timeline.
Maximum donkey speed is given by different online sources a between 30 and 45 km/h. Maximum human speed is for most people around 25 km/h over short distances, much less over longer distances, but still around 15 km/h over a few kilometers. I don't know how long donkeys can keep running at high speed.
I suppose the difference isn't huge.
Two points. One, if on a donkey you are riding not walking. That usually means higher status as well as less effort to travel the distance. Two, in warfare, if the donkey warriors are retreating then the higher speed even for a short distance means that they escape from the enemy.
At the end of the day, riding a AH donkey need not be as good as a OTL horse. It just needs to be better in the AH than being on foot.
And you think 5-10 km/h isn't a big difference? If so you are wrong.