WI: American Horses

I think bison could survive. It'll be thousands of years between the population explosion of bison (which though the extinction of the American horse was a cause of it, it was also because of the extinction of the various Pleistocene bison species like B. latifrons and B. antiquus) and the domestication of horses. Bison numbers, though not as high OTL since they'll still have the American horse as a competitor, will be quite high. It'll take a while to put a significant dent in them, and hopefully after the first few population crashes (both of bison and people), the culture would adapt so the horse nomads don't kill off their most important prey. They'll have thousands of years to learn how to do this, compared to a few centuries while constantly being pushed on all sides by Europeans.

Depends which North American horse gets domesticated as to the range. That's certainly true with the Eurasian horse, but is it necessarily with the North American horse?
 
Incorrect sir! Part of the reason, yes. But much more of the damage was burning from lightning strikes, strikes that would create giant fires that burned tens of thousands of acres of land and only peter out when the fire encountered an area of no fuel due to the devastation caused by a wandering buffalo herd.
back when I was a range student, we discussed things like grazing and fires. One of the things to note about native grasses of the Great Plains is that they were designed to lose out to both regularly and then recover... they have growing points very close to the soil, so a fire or vast herd of grazing buffalo would take everything above the growing points and then move on; so long as the grasses aren't burnt or grazed over and over and over, they recover pretty fast.

As for horses... this subject has come up on here before, and I always note that if it did happen, the NAs would have one big domestic animal and a fair amount of native crops in the long run, so the horse would be everything to them; transportation, food, etc.... you'd see settlements with horses, corn, beans, squash, turkeys, etc...
 
Depends which North American horse gets domesticated as to the range. That's certainly true with the Eurasian horse, but is it necessarily with the North American horse?

That's a good point. I was of course thinking of Equus ferus, which was silly of me.

I think I still disagree on the bison, though. Though all of this is, of course, utterly speculative. I just don't see why they should be different than the other megafauna. Granted, the large climate shifts of around 12,000BCE had to play some part, too, not just humans. And I also cannot offhand think of a nomadic hunter/gathering horse culture that survived into modern times. They all eventually went pastoralist at the least- Scythians, Huns, Mongols, etc. They are just too damned efficient at hunting in a steppe environment where the prey has no place to hide- so they hunt themselves into starvation. (Native Americans were a special case- they got the horse very late and just hadn't had time to succeed in killing off enough prey animals. Human generation time is quite long.) Yes, this might result in continuous boom/busts like with lynx and hares, or the wolves and moose on Isle Royale. But I suspect that more likely some smartguy in one of the bust cycles would decide to just start herding food horses. (Perhaps bred smaller?) Or llamas, if available. Or whatever.

I could be wrong. I just can't think of one.
 
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That's a good point. I was of course thinking of Equus ferus, which was silly of me.

I think I still disagree on the bison, though. Though all of this is, of course, utterly speculative. I just don't see why they should be different than the other megafauna. Granted, the large climate shifts of around 12,000BCE had to play some part, too, not just humans. And I also cannot offhand think of a nomadic hunter/gathering horse culture that survived into modern times. They all eventually went pastoralist at the least- Scythians, Huns, Mongols, etc. They are just too damned efficient at hunting in a steppe environment where the prey has no place to hide- so they hunt themselves into starvation. (Native Americans were a special case- they got the horse very late and just hadn't had time to succeed in killing off enough prey animals. Human generation time is quite long.) Yes, this might result in continuous boom/busts like with lynx and hares, or the wolves and moose on Isle Royale. But I suspect that more likely some smartguy in one of the bust cycles would decide to just start herding food horses. (Perhaps bred smaller?) Or llamas, if available. Or whatever.

Yeah, that's probably what would happen regarding food horses. Even if there was a taboo on horseflesh amongst the Plains Indians, we see indications that it was beginning to be lost by the 1870s so I see no indications that if one ever arose, it wouldn't go away before long (maybe during the decades or centuries-long droughts that occurred in much of North America prior to the 1500s).
 
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