Tsetse Fly dies out

It's 2000 BC. Some tired people on Salisbury Plain are admiring their handiwork, the Xia Dynasty is doing whatever it was doing and Minoan gentlewomen are enjoying not being killed by a volcano.

Over the course of the year, all the Tsetse flies in Africa become sterile and die. How are things affected? Do crops and animals spread south? Do new civilisations spring into being?
 
Depends on when and where they get the animals from, yet; this is a sleeper until they establish contact with another civilization to acquire horses from. But that might happen as early as the Phoenicians and Carthage.

That's probably the angle I'd go for, actually; Carthage sells them horses and other livestock, and when Rome crushes Carthage, the West Africans move to compete with Rome for North Africa...
 
How does this affect the ability of Europeans to colonise West Africa? I once wrote a long timeline and the beginnings of a story (Guinea) that was then shot down by people quoting disease at me, and had to be abandoned.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
How does this affect the ability of Europeans to colonise West Africa?


The tse tse fly dying out would mainly affect European livestock. Europeans themselves will still be affected by the myriads of other sub-Saharan African diseases.

How about flipping this question on it's head? African diseases like malaria and other eventually made it out into the wider world, why not the tse tse?

What if the tse tse "invaded" the Mediterranean as malaria did?
 
Depends on when and where they get the animals from, yet; this is a sleeper until they establish contact with another civilization to acquire horses from. But that might happen as early as the Phoenicians and Carthage.

I don't think it would be such a sleeper necessarily, the tsetse fly had (and in some places still has) a rather dire effect on the human population. Many extremely fertile areas which would have yielded civilization of some kind elsewhere in the world could not do so in Africa, almost entirely due to the tsetse.

So, I'd suggest there would be, first, larger settled populations and most complex societies throughout the region compared to OTL within a few centuries from the PoD. Malaria and other diseases remain an issue, though.

The arrival of horses and cows will have a big effect too. I personally think that the main reason that the Sahel didn't develop horse-nomad cultures was due to the tsetse and the lack of settled peoples to prey upon. Tsetselessness extends the range for potential horse-nomads to the south, and creates a cultural and economic highway between the cultures of West Africa, and those of Egypt and Ethiopia (and beyond to Asia).

Too many butterflies to speculate too much about whether Europe will enter the Age of Discovery as in OTL, or whether sea trade along the cost of northwest Africa between the west African cultures and the Mediterranean means an earlier discovery of Brazil. But whoever gets there first will soon have a highly sought after trade good if they know what they find: quinine, to treat the malaria that ravages the kingdoms of Africa.
 
How about flipping this question on it's head? African diseases like malaria and other eventually made it out into the wider world, why not the tse tse?

What if the tse tse "invaded" the Mediterranean as malaria did?

I have a small writeup for a scenario in which the tsetse fly colonises Southeast Asia somewhere on my computer, I will have to look it up.

But my gut reaction is that, a Mediterranean Tsetse = No Western Civilization.
 
How does this affect the ability of Europeans to colonise West Africa? I once wrote a long timeline and the beginnings of a story (Guinea) that was then shot down by people quoting disease at me, and had to be abandoned.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

The tsetse fly is the reason West Africans didn't have cattle, or horses in civilian hands. Its bite is pretty lethal to horses (and not good for other mammals) so that, while cavalry was too powerful a military tool to be abandoned altogether, horses were kept in airtight barns as much as possible and only allowed to graze with two minders per horse to make sure no flies got to them. No one but the monarch could afford that. No tsetse = horses = much more available power. The ability to raise cattle, while nice, is secondary to that. West African cultures already built rather good roads, if they could move goods and equipment along them swiftly they'd have a real empire soon enough.

What happens when Europeans contact West Africans will depend on the author's take on West Africa + horses, whether it's a culture that can be gradually suborned (like India) or too problematic to bother, or still much like OTL's Africa. If they've been able to keep large livestock alive since 2000 BC, though, I expect we'll see civilization(s) in the classical period in contact with Rome and Carthage; how they interact with Christian Europe and Islamic Middle East could be anyone's guess. I imagine a slave trade still starting, but subject to wild fluctuation depending on the mood and domestic political considerations of the West African monarchs...
 
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Thande

Donor
Nice idea. Butterflies will soon set in of course but this could be the basis for something like Jared's Lands of Red and Gold, only with an African setting.
 
Most African empires were cavalry empires, so no tse tse is huge in terms of how far they can spread.

And the Great Lakes and Zambia will certainly become major centres, eventually spreading their style of kingship to the coasts as well.
 
Eventually, another creature is going to fill the tsetse fly's niche. So sleeping sickness may end up marginalized, but diseases that depend on an insect vector will still have a good shot in Africa. So Africans have a leg up, but they're not entirely out of harm's way.
 
Can the Zebra, the African buffalo, or the jackal, be domesticated?
They can be tamed; domestication is a strong word. The zebra is an evil-tempered beast that makes a camel look like the soul of charity, but if you have no horses, you could use one. The African buffalo can be penned and raised for food, but I don't think much of your odds of getting one to pull a plow. I've never heard of tame jackals from a reputable source, but that doesn't make it impossible.
 
Can the Zebra, the African buffalo, or the jackal, be domesticated?

I kinda wonder why they would bother when the most prominent point of the POD is that the Eurasian domesticated animals would have an easier time in Africa, hope that isn't too blunt.

Tormsen said:
I have a small writeup for a scenario in which the tsetse fly colonises Southeast Asia somewhere on my computer, I will have to look it up.

I found your thread about that from last year! You deserved more replies than zero.

Tormsen said:
cultural and economic highway between the cultures of West Africa, and those of Egypt and Ethiopia (and beyond to Asia)
So awesome!
as a side point, if we have a more advanced and maybe oceanfaring West Africa with horses, could they also be galloping around South America in due time? :D I hope we can avoid butterflying away the ancient ironworks in west Africa too!... Wait, do we have ironworking Egyptians and South Americans then? 0_o

I fudged together this map to get my head around geography a bit- you can find the original map and key for it on Wikimedia commons.

mappa.png


If we talk about sub-Saharan civilisations growing up, do we mean very very vaguely Khoi-San ones? Or even more vague- we can only say they're 'not Niger-Congo speaking'? Or do we get alternate, or quicker migrations from peoples in the north on their horses that displace these people earlier than OTL?
 
The ability to raise cattle, while nice, is secondary to that.

This is so wrong, in so many ways, I had to take the time to stop lurking and register just so I could reply to it :cool:

The ability to raise cattle would be the GREATEST change ITTL. Cattle are more than food in and of themselves. They provide leather, meat, milk, yes, and all the products that come from that. But more importantly they're a source of industry. Cattle can be used to plow more fields, which increases agricultural output. This means a higher population, meaning higher population density, meaning more specialization. More people doesn't just mean more peasants working the land; it means more smithes and artisians, more priests, more tax collectors, more warriors, more nobles, and etc etc etc. The rise of great urbanized cities, as cultural anchor points, is one of the hallmarks of civilization. Futhermore, cattle can be used to actually construct said cities; a large ox can be used to pull heavy objects, and power basic machinery. It can be, and has been argued, that the rise of Euasian civilization is tied to the use of cattle.

Horses, while nice, is secondary to all that ;)
 
Cattle can be used to plow more fields, which increases agricultural output.


You forgot to mention manure which really increases agricultural output, especially in the year-round growing season of the subtropics.

Then there's urine which can be put to a variety of uses and which can be used to make seemingly incidental things like saltpeter...

Look at Bengal's cattle-dependent native saltpeter industry and imagine the same transplanted across west Africa. Controlling the access to Bengal and that saltpeter helped Britain quite a bit during the Napoleonic Era. What changes would a larger, similar industry much closer to Europe create?
 
This is so wrong, in so many ways, I had to take the time to stop lurking and register just so I could reply to it :cool:

The ability to raise cattle would be the GREATEST change ITTL. Cattle are more than food in and of themselves. They provide leather, meat, milk, yes, and all the products that come from that. But more importantly they're a source of industry.

All good and important things...which you'll get from nearly any large domesticated ungulate, horses included. If you only get one, you take the horse, since you can train it for a greater variety of tasks.

But there's no reason I can see for them to be limited to one or the other, of course :)
 
Cattle beat horses for meat, milk, and convenience for heavy pulling until the invention of a good horse collar. Horses can be adapted to a lot of things, but they remain primarily what they've always been - a war animal or a status animal.
 
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