I recently watched a documentary about a brief history of each continent when I noticed horses were really common everywhere for an example Genghis khan in Asia, Saladin in Africa, natives in North and South America and all over Europe too. I know they’ve been brought with settlers to Australia because it was mentioned in the documentary but what about the other continents ?
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It’s notable that in pre-Columbian America the wheel was known, but only used in children’s toys. It took horses to make them really useful.
How? Well, when you connect a horse to a cart you can pull 1.5 times the weight of the horse over long distances. So if you have a 1000 pound horse you can move 1500 pounds of cargo with one horse. A human, by contrast, can only move a maximum of 50% of his body weight for long distances. So a single porter might move 50 pounds.
Then there’s moving heavy stuff short distances. A horse can pull a log, for example, that might take 20 men to move.
So horses are pretty darn useful for moving stuff.
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