What if Horses Never Existed?

this video was sponsored by Nordby pn a virtual private network service that provides much-needed safety in an age where cybersecurity is more important than ever and for a limited time get a special 75% off at Nord VPN dot-com / August humans are the most intelligent species on earth we have large brains and a complex social structure but there's only so much we can do with the cards were given at the start of a game historically our cities societies and way of life were entirely dependent on while our spawn point and people had to make do with the geography and resources at their disposal but geography wasn't the only factor historically in the old world there was one thing all people had at their disposal easily domesticated animals it's almost miraculous the small herbivores like goats pigs and sheep even exist at all and cows while big are easy to control due to their herd mentality with all these animals evolving in the old world and allowed for humans to easily settle in the cities butchering their new farm animals for meat and receiving nutrients that crops like grain of rice couldn't supply it's almost like these animals were made to be used by humans and that's why many cultures inserted those beliefs into their mythologies but there was always one animal that was special in a way it was too important and resourceful to simply slaughtered for meat it was different than the goats or cows the horse people in Central Asia a land of endless grasslands recognized that horses were more useful alive than as food and they went through great lengths to tame these animals and even eventually to ride them horses are in my opinion the most important animal in human history simply by then existing horse travel opened up a new world of potential they allow for people to cover distances that would have taken days or months on foot affecting everything from trade to communication and the war and the process and made that vast continent of Eurasia far smaller and process so what if they all turn timeline the horse simply didn't exist what if there was never such an animal for armies to ride on or for traders to travel on I know this entire concept seems weird and far-fetched but strangely enough it easily could have happened when I say if horses never existed I mean if they didn't exist by the time that humans began creating settlements horses evolved in North America not in Asia they grew into what we would call a modern horse on the Great Plains and were so successful they roamed throughout the continent some even going into South America this all changed with the Ice Age when the glaciers covered a majority of the continent limiting the range that horses could travel and limiting their food supply and their numbers however there were paths in the glaciers that could be traveled these paths were how ancient hunter-gatherers made their way from Asia down south into North America some horses and even camelids migrated north in return camels are from the Americas as well which is why we have llamas and alpacas fun fact however unlike the llamas the Ice Age was the death for North American horses they were small a number already trapped in pockets in the glacier and by the time that humans came they were simply hunted for food horses wouldn't return to the Americas until 12,000 years later when the horses brought over the descendants of those who escaped that's actually why horses seem to take so quickly to North America and those that did escaped thousands of years ago simply migrated to an environment that was much like North the plains of Asia in the forests of Europe and those alternate timeline that the horses do not migrate up north instead if they simply wither and are hunted to extinction perhaps their bones eventually discovered and seen as some strange lost lineage of mammal like we see the woolly mammoths or giant sloth today humans of modern times never would actually know what a horse looks like the average person wouldn't own a horse an ancient or even medieval times so this doesn't change so much but it certainly changes the communication time between kingdoms diplomacy and war are far slower in many places around the world this wasn't Universal throughout the world some regions which relied less on a horse like the frozen Arctic or the deserts of the Sahara would see little change at all assuming camels still existed they'd be useful as long-haul transport animals ox could still pull carts just at a slower rate but the horse filled a specific niche a fast mobile animal or most importantly warfare even as early as the Bronze Age cultures horses had been domesticated by Mesopotamians Hittites and Egyptians the chariot was the tank of its day and it dominated the battlefield eventually went horseback riding became gnorm the Calvary was the decisive factor in battle it was the best for scouting or for raiding but most importantly allowed for the influence of a kingdom to be felt far past its traditional borders without the horse ancient warfare is a slower and also more chaotic affair without the threat of Calvary entire military tactics and weapons never are developed since there is no need to accommodate for that threat I'm not gonna go into how every single war would have been changed without the use of horses but I think this one is a good example the Macedonians turned the Greek world on its head by using Calvary as a fundamental chord to their military strategy using the horses to flank and catch the enemy from behind this was called the hammer and anvil strategy the anvil was the solid infantry and the Calvary was the hammer without such a remarkable tactic like this I doubt Alexander's Empire would have reached the heights that it did in his lifetime this goes for many vast empires who relied on Calvary in this alternate world the very foundation of livelihoods for nomadic people like the Mongols Turks or skiffins never arises the grasslands and steppes they felt at home on is now basically their death sentence as a successful culture the distance from Mongolia to Kazakh Stan is short relatively on a horse but for a human now that is a journey people in the center the continent would be in a position where they are thousands of miles away from not just a main civilization to raid or trade with but also each other as far harder to unify a band of tribes together if they live so far apart they are now trapped in a vast sea without a boat and this transforms a lot of early civilizations the Middle East had a history in the Bronze Age of nomadic Raiders conquering the already settled cities than settling themselves in transforming the region in the process these raids were really the only thing that made horse riders relevant and terrifying to the rest of the but without horses they're simply far away tribal people who have less people for an army and horses allowed for smaller nomads who shouldn't have been able to win against a large civilization to control the battlefield so that means in an alternate timeline there is no Mongolian Empire no Seljuk Turks and veins no constant destruction of the Middle Eastern Empire's from the steppe people and no han ik invasions there isn't much that can be discussed about this however because even the Empire's affected would be changed without horses the entire global map would have transformed in the ancient world the connections of the Silk Road or the close-knit nature of the Roman Empire becomes almost impossible to constantly upkeep since communication is only as fast as a man can run so the horse was pretty important you could say and historically if there is one thing all cultures agreed on it was that the horse was something bigger than just an animal for the nomads of Central Asia the horse was their world for the Europeans a horse was a noble companion at war the Chinese discovered the Greeks had powerful or in their words heavenly horses and wanted them so much they fought a war against them for animals yes that is real thing look it up the horse for all of human history has always been universally respected it's an amount of respect that no other animal has really ever gotten the horses were seen as partners on the battlefield you relied on your horse to survive and that's because humans domesticated or tsa's unlocked new potential for civilizations horses bore the hard work that humans even with their brains couldn't do by themselves until the invention of cars and tanks which made them relics and a modern war that's why the horse population has only shrunk in the last century we shouldn't forget just how much this one single animal existing in the right place at the right time an animal that was actually from the wrong continent and almost went the way of the mammoths changed the course of mankind I don't think we will because even though these animals haven't been useful outside of ranching for a century they're still fundamentally tied to even new cultures more than any domesticated animal Americans still have a fascination with horses because just like the first horse writers in Asia this animal made a vast continent just a little bit smaller and for the natives that fought against it they saddle up their own horses and both sides riding their companions fought each other on the plains of the West where the history of the horse first began this video was sponsored by nordley pn a VPN as a virtual private network basically what Nord VPN does is it secures your information through it whenever you go online by accessing a private network with military-grade encryption you can protect yourself they have thousands of servers from 60 countries that you can access and with a simple interface it's easy to set up say I want to have a new address in France or Germany Nord VPN allows you to do that and it works on any iOS and Android phones and Windows or Mac for computer Nord VPN is offering my viewers 75% off a three year plan plus for a limited time one extra month when you use the code oldest just go to Nord VPN comm slash a list or click the link in the description to sign up that's Nord VPN comm slash alth ist and use the code all test at checkout to get started today this is Kody of alternate history of you

Channel: AlternateHistoryHub

Views: 459,196

Rating: 4.9325075 out of 5

Keywords: Horses, What if horses never existed, horses alternate history, alternatehistoryhub, horses never existed, alternate history, history of cavalry, history of the horse, what if, what if the horse didn't exist?, mongol empire, spread of the mongols, central asia horses, domestication of the horse, horse warfare, warfare history, alternate history hub

Id: vFF3nRKoLWg

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Muhschel]

I feel like some kind of car would have been invented considerably earlier.

Coming up with something that's faster than an ox wouldn't have been impossible even back in Roman times

[u/FINLAND111]

Then the winged hussars would have never arrived and come down the mountain side

[u/fangwolf4]

I was slightly disappointed he didn't mentioned the Indo-Europeans

[u/Jaaasus]

I feel like his videos get more and more vague with every new one.

[u/Crash_D]

Nature abhors a vacuum. There would have been some animal that would have been used in place of the horse.

Then we all might be "Theodore Roosevelt riding a bull moose" cool. 😁