What if no horse?

I haven't seen any comments yet on how this would have affected technological developments as a whole on humanity?

Would people have had to become more ingenious in the various transportation devices and mechanisms they developed to get around, without having the beasts of burden to help out?

Or would it have hindered our development?
 
I haven't seen any comments yet on how this would have affected technological developments as a whole on humanity?

Would people have had to become more ingenious in the various transportation devices and mechanisms they developed to get around, without having the beasts of burden to help out?

Or would it have hindered our development?
it would hinder our development greatly as the greater population centers of the world used these animals for defense, trade, and warfare. This led to technolgical innovations like the chariot, sattle, and trading over larger areas made growth easier which ment larger populations as food coulb be brought in at larger amounts to population centers like cities.

This grew cities further and they needed different designed buildings like two floors, apartments, hotels were made for travelers from afar but without horses fewer people will travel very far from home except at ports.

inland cities will be even smaller.

horses made postel offices services easier here the incan road and runner system is better.

people might actually try to ride the two leg birds in a horseless world.
 
Well, if deer got domesticated to fill the void, it might be considered a bit profane to hunt them or they'd be even more sacred to deities such as Artemis.
 
Well, if deer got domesticated to fill the void, it might be considered a bit profane to hunt them or they'd be even more sacred to deities such as Artemis.

I disagree. Humans tend not to view livestock as sacred (with one or two exceptions, such as cows in India).

It's possible that humans could domesticate deer, but deer are a little more complicated to take care of than, say, sheep. Reindeer pastoralists IOTL have to fit their life to their animals by following their migrations rather than herding them like cattle pastoralists. A world with deer as widespread domestic animals will have a very different system of farming-in some areas, farmers may decide that hunting is better than animal husbandry, and set up deer parks to allow wild meat to grow instead of going at the hard task of herding deer.
 
As it was already pointed out, civilization as we know it will never surface. The Indo-european tribes, will likely never make it out of Ukraine. The afro-asiatic farmers that brought faming into Europe, and the Near East will likely expand further as would the Sinic rice farmers. All groups will be less heterogenous as travel will be much more difficult, for those who are not near a coast or large river system.

The American civilizations pre colonization provide a good model for what the world would look like. Peoples with access to reliable pack animals like the llama, will be able to create uniform empires that stretch quite a bit just like the Inca did- though never something like the Mongols did in OTL with the assistance of the horse. But I think most will resemble the Maya city-state organization or city-empire/kingdom ala Aztec or Tarascan style. Even if the discovery or iron-working is still made; they will have an old-world tinge to them but

Without the horses and camels, it is also likely that the domestication of larger pack and herding animals will be harder or maybe not even come to be as well. And trade becomes much more difficult, especially across deserts without camels. Assume people remain much more isolated from each other. Once again the Americas provide the good model, where the Meso-american peoples had very little-to-no contact with the South American or the Mississippian cultures.

This means there will be a lot less cross cultural fertilization. And as a consequence, progress will be slower.

I'd would also expect that the need for more human of labor to create much more caste based societies (this pretty much happened in the American civilizations).

No everything will be the same as the Americas though, lets assume iron-working and casting is still developed in the old world. This alone will make things very different from OTL American civilizations. And once sea faring gets sufficiently advance, we can expect a much large emphasis on it and push to further maritime / river trade. After all I'd expect the big land routes like the silk road between and trans-saharan / sahel routes to be very limited here.


You know for all the "Americas domesticates" TLs here, the board could use a "Eurasia non-domesticate" counterpart.
 
As it was already pointed out, civilization as we know it will never surface. The Indo-european tribes, will likely never make it out of Ukraine. The afro-asiatic farmers that brought faming into Europe, and the Near East will likely expand further as would the Sinic rice farmers. All groups will be less heterogenous as travel will be much more difficult, for those who are not near a coast or large river system.

The American civilizations pre colonization provide a good model for what the world would look like. Peoples with access to reliable pack animals like the llama, will be able to create uniform empires that stretch quite a bit just like the Inca did- though never something like the Mongols did in OTL with the assistance of the horse. But I think most will resemble the Maya city-state organization or city-empire/kingdom ala Aztec or Tarascan style. Even if the discovery or iron-working is still made; they will have an old-world tinge to them but

Without the horses and camels, it is also likely that the domestication of larger pack and herding animals will be harder or maybe not even come to be as well. And trade becomes much more difficult, especially across deserts without camels. Assume people remain much more isolated from each other. Once again the Americas provide the good model, where the Meso-american peoples had very little-to-no contact with the South American or the Mississippian cultures.

I'd would also expect that the need for more human of labor to create much more caste based societies (this pretty much happened in the American civilizations).
Maya political organization more resembled feudal Europe or Japan than the classical Greek city-states everyone imagines. They're only called city-states at all because unimaginative and lazy archaeologists in a bygone era believed the big fancy ruins were the extent of the entire civilization, despite a wealth of ethnographic and historical records suggesting otherwise. Furthermore, North and Central America (don't know much about South America but what I do know suggests the same thing) were generally much more egalitarian than the Old World and had more social mobility and less class restrictions. The most restrictive societies were no more so than medieval Europe.
 
This might make those areas with war animals different from horses and camels more prominent as animals like Elephants, Oxen, and yaks are harder to breed.

They and dogs likely didn't follow the horse domestication design.

But i suspect goats might be a possible replacement species as they may start being breed to be bigger and tougher animals.

Sledge dogs are more common as sledge warfare akin to what is seen in the colder regions allows indo-europeans to enter and dominate european continent.

Euroaso african Goats might make the Euraso-african nations better off than the american peoples still as they are slightly better than llamas and their domestication was very early as well.
 
Top