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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There’s this thing called “horse power”.
Not just horses, mules, camels, yaks, alpacas, etc etc.
Long before any human made steam power or internal combustion engine horses were available for transportation, warfare and power.
Fun fact! Horses were not native to the Americas…kinda.
They were initially here several millennia ago, but went extinct around 10,000 years ago. Then they came back over with the Spanish and the various First Nation citizens found them very useful because they were so easily tamable.
Source: Nez Perce family who are very into horses and live on The Palouse, the plains in the Pacific Northwest region of the USA.
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Correct me if I’m wrong but horses didn’t exist in North and South American until they were brought here by colonizers and explorers. Technically speaking Horses are an invasive species in the Americas.
They’re super useful to humans, so we took them with us all around the world. The Spanish brought them to the Americas, BTW.
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.
Well horses aren’t native to the Americas either. They were at some point in the past (around 10k years ago), then went extinct, I assume due to the ice age, then other species of equine were introduced again. In Australia, no hooved animals are native by the way.
Horses originally came from North America. At least their ancestors did. They crossed into Asia and evolved into the modern horse. Their ancestors back in the Americas went extinct and were cut off from Asia and Europe. Eventually the Europeans brought them to America and released them into the wild. The Americas just have a really good climate for horses.
Horses were brought to the Americas. There were no Native American horses until the Europeans came.
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