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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Parts of this are true, parts of this not.
Horses evolved I believe in Central Asia, and, once domesticated by humans, quickly spread across the continent wherever humans were, because if you’re trading goods with your neighbors and you have horses, you’re gonna do it on horseback, and they will quickly grow interested in getting some of those cool horses, on top of humans spreading wild horses far outside their normal habitats, where the animals managed to adapt. Horses spread throughout The Old World mostly through human intervention and support, because they’re very social animals, thus animals we can get to do what we want, and very *useful* animals, more so every few generations of selective breeding, for transport, for labor, and for warfare.
Pre-Columbian Exchange (The exchange of diseases, plants and animals between the Old and New World following the America’s discovery by Europeans), there were no horses in the Americas. The first Horses in the America’s were released by the Spanish colonists in what would eventually become Mexico, what we call Mustangs, who spread across the continent as an invasive species alongside wold pigs. The American Great Plains were not heavily populated at this time, both because they weren’t and aren’t that habitable of a location, and because most of the *Americas* had become a lot less heavily populated due to the advent of European diseases absolutely devastating the continent and its population. It is in this post-Colombian Exchange America that the Plains Native American Tribes emerged, adapting to new circumstances with a new way of life, living in the Great Plains in nomadic tribes, riding horses and Hunting massive Buffalo herds.
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