Survival of the an American horse

This isn't another thread asking "what might happen if horses survived in North America?". It is a similar type of thread, but does not involve the Great Pains or North America.

The megafauna of Patagonia died out before humans arrived in the area, but what if they hadn't?

So I pose two senarios, the first being this. What if the Patagonian Megafauna had survived to the point when humans arrived in the region, going extinct in the rest of the Americas? The migratory peoples who came to Patagonia aren't going to be in the great numbers as those farther north and so the megafauna might be able to adapt to their changing world, just like the Rhea did OTL, and so instead of humans being the reason for their demise they are instead the reason for their propigation outside of Patagonia and their reintroduction into to the rest of South America. Just to let you know, this means that their would be two species of Mastodon living in South America: Stegomastodon and Cuvieronius.

The second senario is "What if the Patagonian horse survived and was dommesticated?"
How would this affect the plains nomads of Patagonia and the rest of South America?
 
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First, I'm not sure I buy the "Megafauna died out before humans arrived" assumption in this scenario.

Second, if horses survived long enough to be domesticated in Patagonia it would create butterflies that would quickly distort the path of Indian cultural development. My initial guess is that it would lead to a higher level of technology overall, because domesticated horses would spread into the Andes, and then probably to North America. The increased mobility would allow cultural innovations to spread more rapidly. None of the specific political groupings that the conquistadors encountered would exist in this scenario--no Aztec or Incas, though there would probably be roughly analogous groups.

There is some possibility that horses might actually decrease the technological complexity of Indian cultures. I don't see this as the most likely outcome, but it could lead to the rise of nomadic raiding groups powerful enough to push farming groups out of some of their historic areas. They might also abort the development of some food crops by spreading the first few crops to be developed and aborting the development of additional crops.

In any case, no Indian individual that Europeans met would exist in this scenario, and very few of the tribes would exist in the exact form they did historically.
 
First, I'm not sure I buy the "Megafauna died out before humans arrived" assumption in this scenario.

Second, if horses survived long enough to be domesticated in Patagonia it would create butterflies that would quickly distort the path of Indian cultural development. My initial guess is that it would lead to a higher level of technology overall, because domesticated horses would spread into the Andes, and then probably to North America. The increased mobility would allow cultural innovations to spread more rapidly. None of the specific political groupings that the conquistadors encountered would exist in this scenario--no Aztec or Incas, though there would probably be roughly analogous groups.

There is some possibility that horses might actually decrease the technological complexity of Indian cultures. I don't see this as the most likely outcome, but it could lead to the rise of nomadic raiding groups powerful enough to push farming groups out of some of their historic areas. They might also abort the development of some food crops by spreading the first few crops to be developed and aborting the development of additional crops.

In any case, no Indian individual that Europeans met would exist in this scenario, and very few of the tribes would exist in the exact form they did historically.

About the megafaunal extinction, most paleontologists agree that most of Patagonia's megafauna had gone extinct before the first humans arrived in the area around 12,500 BCE.

The isthmus of Panama after the end of the ice age is more of a barrier than a bridge, and so it would likely take boats to take horses from South America to North America. How might a likely technologically more advanced South American civilization look at the less advanced peoples of North America?
 
About the megafaunal extinction, most paleontologists agree that most of Patagonia's megafauna had gone extinct before the first humans arrived in the area around 12,500 BCE.

Can you name some examples of those "most"? I'm fairly sure Mylodon and Cuvieronius at least were still around way after that date, and that there are remains of Toxodon with clear evidences of having been hunted and processed by humans.

Anyway, a quick look at Wikipedia gives the extinction date for the South American horse Hippidion as 10,000 years ago.
 
Can you name some examples of those "most"? I'm fairly sure Mylodon and Cuvieronius at least were still around way after that date, and that there are remains of Toxodon with clear evidences of having been hunted and processed by humans.

Anyway, a quick look at Wikipedia gives the extinction date for the South American horse Hippidion as 10,000 years ago.

Mylodon was a widespread animal that was adaptable to a large range of habitats so it can be counted as a hardy survivor that unlike most of the other mega-beasts of Patagonia survived the ecological upheavel only to be driven to extinction by man. Cuvieronius survived in Colombia up until about 6,060 years ago and possibly even longer in Mexico, it died out in Patagonia long before that possibly as much as a thousand years before the arrival of man in the region(Their survival in Mexico and Colomiba so long after most other megafauna went extinct makes me wonder what would it have been like if they had continued to survive up to and after European contact, maybe we would see war mastodon). As for Toxodon while man may have hunted it, it went extinct roughly 16,000 years ago, a long time before Humans arrived in Patagonia.

Hippidion is what I'm asking about in the second senario. What if it had been domesticated by the nomads?
 
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I think that settled or semi-settled people are more likely to domesticate animals then nomads, as farmers will have the leisure time to build spaces to house captured animals. The extinction of the horse may have been caused by a change in grass species, as C3 grasses became replaced by the more silicate-filled C4 grasses, which wore down the teeth of the animals quickly and caused them to starve to death at a young age, so possibly some different vegetation in the plains of South America will allow the horses (and other grazing megafauna) to survive.
 
I think that settled or semi-settled people are more likely to domesticate animals then nomads, as farmers will have the leisure time to build spaces to house captured animals. The extinction of the horse may have been caused by a change in grass species, as C3 grasses became replaced by the more silicate-filled C4 grasses, which wore down the teeth of the animals quickly and caused them to starve to death at a young age, so possibly some different vegetation in the plains of South America will allow the horses (and other grazing megafauna) to survive.

So an ecological Pod where C3 grass survives and leads to the survival of horses and possibly other megafauna which leads to some of the nomadic people staying in Patagonia year round. Purhaps some of these nomadic foragers hunt the megafauna and like the Botai culture they domesticate horses to help them hunt. These domestic horses would likely eventually spread to other parts of South America over timeand with thier domestication maybe other animals are domesticated after them for purposes like war, like mastodon (this probably wouldn't happen until a stable crop is domesticated).
 
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