WI there were no horses

this subject has come up on here before, and IMO, cattle would do most of the jobs that horses do. They're not as fast, but if you didn't have horses, you wouldn't know that anyway. Wild cattle were widespread, easy to domesticate, and were already big, way bigger than the original wild horses. They could be selectively bred to be bigger/smaller, or for a variety of tasks. With thousands of years to do it, I imagine we could have a breed of cattle that would be fast and built for speed. Camels are another possibility, but their wild ancestors are a lot more limited in location than cattle were...
 
this subject has come up on here before, and IMO, cattle would do most of the jobs that horses do. They're not as fast, but if you didn't have horses, you wouldn't know that anyway. Wild cattle were widespread, easy to domesticate, and were already big, way bigger than the original wild horses. They could be selectively bred to be bigger/smaller, or for a variety of tasks. With thousands of years to do it, I imagine we could have a breed of cattle that would be fast and built for speed. Camels are another possibility, but their wild ancestors are a lot more limited in location than cattle were...

Camels also do poorly in wet and rocky areas, having softer feet more prone to infections - like British Columbia for example. There were IIRC two failed attempts to introduce wild camels here. No go.
 

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Well, no horses means no rapid communication (i.e. mounted couriers),
So? A well-trained distance runner can make roughly 100-120 kilometers in a day even over rough terrain and on bad roads. If there is a network of distance-runners they can take a message 150-180 kilometers per day.

A horse-courier could in a network take a message between 150-250 kilometers per day, but would be highly dependable on roads, change of horses.

Humans have a lot better stamina over long distances then horses do and horses are a lot more prone to suffer delays due to weather and rough terrain then a human is.
 
Humans have a lot better stamina over long distances then horses do and horses are a lot more prone to suffer delays due to weather and rough terrain then a human is.

The whole humans-with-stamina thing gets quoted over and over, but what I can never reconcile is why is it that cultures that made use of the horse were so much more damn mobile than cultures that did not?

To put it this way: a messenger on horseback with two or three horses running alongside him can cross Eurasia in a couple of weeks and a little bit. A messenger changing tired horses at the yams every 150-200K can cross Eurasia in mere days.

A pony express system could cross the entirety of the US in say, 10-14 days, and this was over some really rough terrain too.

You try doing that on foot, keeping in mind that to employ more than one runner is a waste of manpower. Horses are not expensive in cultures with access to lots of grazing.

And this is not only messengers. You try moving human armies around without roads; now try nomads.

The biggest, biggest proof of the necessity of the horse to me is the Saharan Empires. Every last one of them was based around cavalry, even if they had to import horses at great cost. Wherever the Tsetse fly stopped horses from being viable, communications broke down and statehood became much more limited.

Horses are key.
 
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Rubicon

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The whole humans-with-stamina thing gets quoted over and over, but what I can never reconcile is why is it that cultures that made use of the horse were so much more damn mobile than cultures that did not?

What has this got to do with anything?

Horses are key.
No horses are cheaper to train then humans.

But what I wrote was that horses could have been replaced if they never existed by human long-distance runners in a courier capacity.
 
But what I wrote was that horses could have been replaced if they never existed by human long-distance runners in a courier capacity.

There were only a few examples of efficient pre-horse communications, all of them involving runners working to link stone-age civilisations with a low productivity of food - i.e. Incas and Mesoamericans. Amazing by our standards if we consider the technology, not all that amazing compared to what can be done with horses.

Runners are always going to be less efficient and consume more high-end resources than messengers on horses. That people will cope is of course beyond question, we always do. Just not as efficiently.
 
Part of the thing about using horses, or other beast of burden, is that they actually conserve the users energy for something else. If a human is running or pulling a plow he will get exhausted. While a messenger using a horse can go where he needs to, deliver the message, and potentially do something else since he has not expended as much energy as he would have running it himself.
 

Maur

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Well, oxen were used for agriculture and transport anyway, most of the time. Lack of horses means no nomads, and that's extremely good news for sedentary people, and generally faster rise of civilization.

There is slight problem with camels, but i guess you can lump them with horses (and zebras, just to be sure) for wipeout ;)
 
Unless you kill off ALL equines, donkeys will serve many of the roles of horses, possibly even being bred up to riding size.

Donkeys were, and are, useful beasts of burden, and some chariots were pulled by donkeys, which is what the original war use of horses was anyway.
 
I hope this a new fresh take on the topic, (altough i posted it yesterday in another one of this threads;)). I read about a possible solution for these discussed problems in another thread on the board. The Link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_sailing says they were using Wind Chariots even back in ancient egypt. So there is an available fast way to transport people which isnt based on animals and breeding but on advanced technology. This might lead to an interesting different world. Nomads need to tinker with different materials for their ships to improve them instead of relying on superior horsemanship. Admiral Attila has nice sound to it.
 
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Unless you kill off ALL equines, donkeys will serve many of the roles of horses, possibly even being bred up to riding size.

Donkeys were, and are, useful beasts of burden, and some chariots were pulled by donkeys, which is what the original war use of horses was anyway.

In fact all Middle Eastern civilizations developed, and lived for 4000 years, without horses. I'm surprised it took this long for somebody to point out what they did use instead (yeah, I'm lumping donkeys and onagers together here, and I know it).
 
Well, as Flocc and Howery have been saying, agriculturally this should have little (old world) impact; since cows and water buffalo are just as good at plowing. Donkeys would be used much more in the old world as pack animals, along with cattle drawn carts and other more limited animals (elephants, camels).

The real impact of the lack of horses is that there won't be any steppe invaders. There will be people on the steppe, but they;ll be more like the pre-Columbian great plains people, with small groups that are significantly outnumbered by agricultural peoples, and have no particular military advantage. Even with the advent of domesticated sheep and goats, which will presumably make the pastoral, without the benefit of the horse there will be less of them (they can cover less distance as a whole group, including the young, injured, and old); and they won't be able to make such sweeping advances on the the agricultural peoples.

The first major effect of this is that there won't be any Proto-Indo-European expansion (if, as most now do, you hold to the steppe theory) since they won't have their horse based advantage. This is the first of the a series of steppe invasion in OTL that will never happen in ATL. Ever. So, agricultural peoples will have much less to worry about.
 
In fact all Middle Eastern civilizations developed, and lived for 4000 years, without horses. I'm surprised it took this long for somebody to point out what they did use instead (yeah, I'm lumping donkeys and onagers together here, and I know it).
Ja, me too. I should have said 'asses', I suppose as a wider catch-all. I think there were 3 or 4 species used, in all.

Edit: Oops. It looks it it really is just the standard donkey and the not longer kept onager.
 
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