Is there any way they could've had horses? Even maybe not using them, just a fluke because some Yakut came and traded with them (they certainly interacted, didn't they? They're in fairly close proximity)The northernmost horse-riding culture is the Yakuts. The Inuit never used horses.
The Chinese and Japanese had large enough ships to carry equines. However they sailed south west not north east.
Is there any way they could've had horses? Even maybe not using them, just a fluke because some Yakut came and traded with them (they certainly interacted, didn't they? They're in fairly close proximity)
It's way too cold for horses in Chukotka, so most of their herds would starve/freeze to death during the winter, and the people there would have no real reason to try and work around that, since their previous lifestyle worked well enough without horses.
Getting them across the Bering Straight into Alaska would be even harder, and you'd run into most of the same problems.
So a PoD thousands of years prior would be needed, that or a man-made global warming.
There was some discussion on this topic here, and DValdron thought it might be possible for Yakuts with horses to make a summer crossing during the medieval warm period, if they had some compelling reason to flee Siberia.
Different and more brutal Mongol expansion? You could minimally have the Yakuts displaced towards the northeast, which would get them marginally closer to North America.
That sounds good! Most would die unfortunately but some are guaranteed to get through!
The horse originally evolved in North America and spread to Eurasia the other direction. It doesn't need to be moved. It needs to be saved from its local extinction, which occurred after humans were present (which may or may not be related).
Oh, excellent! A pod that comes to mind instantly is just earlier civilization so that it gets domesticated before it dies out (like the llama), or if not than less subsistence on animals by hunter gatherer peoples ( although that would save other species too, megafauna included).
If the factors are not humans than an ASB handwave would be required.
That might involve an ASB handwave, since the Great Plains are perfect for hunting on horseback (both buffalo, and prehistoric buffalo which were even bigger, as well as other megafauna). There must be a reason why the humans of North America killed off the horse rather than attempt to harnass it.
The horse, as I now understand it, was one of the last species to go, so maybe it was hunter gatherers (more so hunter ip than gatherer in this case) just doing what they did best on the poor unfortunate leftover species. Horses only survived hunting in Europe because they had far more territory (and by extension, population) and civilization arose very early in a place where they would have been put to very good use.
Avoid their extinction in the Americas would be a better POD
IRC, horses were harnessed for use with chariots or travois before being ridden (at least on a sustained level). That model could have worked on any of the short-grass prairies of the Americas