Is crossing the Mississippi more difficult than crossing Dnieper, Don, Volga etc.?
Probably. The Lower Mississippi carries more water than those rivers and in places can be over a mile wide.
Is crossing the Mississippi more difficult than crossing Dnieper, Don, Volga etc.?
One thing separating prairie nomads from the missippians or other eastern North American Indians is the Mississippi River-it isn't impassable of course but it does force any nomadic tribes and raiders to have already conquered the Ohio valley and then south into Kentucky or travel across by boat.
As for Mesoamerica-horses would change the game quite a bit-empires like the Aztecs were reliant on human feet and backs-they made the most possible use of these resources but if you add horses it changes mesoamerica's whole political and social dynamic.
And the chichimeca acquired horses and they fought the Spanish to a standstill so I suspect nomadic raiders would pillage the valley of Mexico quite often.
As for the Andes-horses can still be used though the terrain does make it harder.
I´m not sure about that the oldest horse we have know are the mongols Horse and They are pretty well adapted to very bad conditions,so there is no reason that some sub-species of horse will not live in the Canadian Taiga, and then you also have the Norwegian Fjord horse which is really well adapted and enduring in Taiga-like regions.I think horses would also change the Pacific Northwest and California regions quite a bit though how exactly is hard to say-the Canadian prairies as well though once one gets into the taiga and tundra regions horses lose their advantages.
There's Pecari Rex, Equus Regina. It's been asleep for a while though.Do we have any TLs exploring this or similar premise?
There's Pecari Rex, Equus Regina. It's been asleep for a while though.
What the bighorn sheep, peccary and bison all had that prevented and prevents them being domesticated was and is “egalitarian” social structures with no dominance hierarchy. This meant that they would never naturally follow a human leader. Instead, males spent most of their time fighting for access to females, in such a manner that the strongest will win out with no restraint.I think it’s more a matter of 'how hard is it to domesticate them'. In the old world, the mouflon, the boar, the aurochs, the camel, and the horse all had... something... that allowed them to be domesticated fairly easily, some quirk in their social system that allowed early humans to domesticate them. In the new world, the bison, the peccary, and the bighorn all lack whatever that was... in the south, the natives managed to domesticate 3 out of 4 llama species, plus a host of smaller critters, so it wasn’t like they didn’t get the concept...
Just an idea, confederations of peoples in North, Central, South Americas and the islands in and the Caribbean Sea would have been possible because horses would not die out in the Americas. Imagine the map of the Middle Earth from the Lord of the Rings series. The Inca Empire would have been Mordor; Peoples in the Amazon forest part of Gondor; Peoples on the Great Plains and the Pairies part of Rohan. Belegaer the Great Sea the Pacific Ocean. Northern Waste the Canadian Shield around the Hudson Bay. Mythical description of a unknown tribe in the northeastern part the Vikings settlements on the island of Newfoundland.