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.

Completely agree with you there

As for the Andes-horses can still be used though the terrain does make it harder.

Only a Little as most of the Andes they are really big plains in the Altiplano Peruvian-Bolivian-Argentinian-Chilean, where the Horse are adapted just fine, and in the northern side you have the Gran Sabana Venezuela-Colombian, so you will have a lost of horse in the Andes.

Plus you forget the coastal plains that are the zone more inhabited of south america,

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.
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.
 

ar-pharazon

Banned
On second thought your right adaptation to the Andes and other parts of South America wouldn't be as hard as I am making to be.

And yeah adapting to sub arctic conditions would be possible as well.
 
The only part of south América that i dobut There Will ve horse Is The Amazon Forest, The terrain There Is really hostil to horses and cattle in genneral
 

Plebian

Banned
Horses gives the Native Americans better return for their effort. More food, bigger surpluses, more resources for tech development and projects by exploration. American Indians and Asians/Africans/Europeans make contact with each other and from then on there's a continuous flow of info and diseases between the two. American Indian states compete with and become powerful on the world stage.
 
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...
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.

When I first read Jared Diamond, I noticed that “egalitarian” (for want of a better word) social structures that precluded domestication were an absolute universal amongst North American mammals. Diamond, unfortunately, has never discussed what has selected for the universality of “egalitarian” social structures amongst North American mammals. Moreover, in my opinion there exists a strong possibility that the issue is actually strong selection for hierarchical social structures amongst mammals in certain parts of Eurasia rather than decisive selection for “egalitarian” social structures amongst North American mammals.

When reading Jared Diamond, I myself thought that the extremely steep and difficult terrain of the Himalayas and Andes would have selected for a change from “egalitarian” to dominance-hierarchy social structures due to better herd navigation, and that the rise of the Himalayas was thus a prerequisite for animal domestication. Whilst I have never been able to have this argument verified or refuted, it is still interesting. Much more recently, Charlie K. Cornwallis has suggested in his ‘Cooperation Facilitates the Colonization of Harsh Environments’ that the hot, hyperarid desert environments of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa selected for the hierarchical social structures that allowed camels, sheep and goats to be domesticated, in contrast to the “egalitarian” social structures of their Western Hemisphere counterparts living in wetter and more fertile landscapes. The problem with Cornwallis’ argument is that the cooperation he is referring to is not the same as that type of social structure necessary for domestication, nor is Cornwallis talking about herbivorous mammals but rather smaller insectivorous homiotherms.

One can be more “certain” of North America’s camelids being domesticated had they survived, but there is still the possibility of selection for “egalitarian” social structures overwhelming even pre-existing dominance hierarchies.

In that highly plausible scenario, the survival would make no difference at all, except for more protein (and fewer natives due to the lower fertility under protein-rich diets) than observed. Thus, paradoxically, the continued presence of horses and other large mammals would have potentially meant a more complete extermination of Native Americans than was actually observed, as with the extra protein available there would have been less incentive to begin farming with lower-density populations, and thus even more vulnerability to diseases exterminating natives.
 
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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.
 
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.

Mesoamerica and the Andes had some pretty big states and confederations IOTL. Even Northern America might have since Cahokia seems to have spread its influence over quite a distance, so nearby settlements might have formed a confederation with it. Not an empire, and doesn't hold a candle to what the Maya were doing a few centuries earlier, but it still was a thing. You don't need horses to get some pretty effective states/confederations in the Americas.
 
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