How could a low fantasy setting develop without horses?

unicorns?

There were several in the American South and Eastern seaboard, all with extensive trade networks, they just didn't have a written language.

Use elephants instead.

Zebras

>extensive trade network
They specifically lacked trade. They had a good number of stand-alone civilizations but you can't regularly march 300 miles carrying bulk materials.

>They specifically lacked trade

Bullshit.

I imagine that a fantasy setting without dedicated warhorses would be a lot less like our feudal Europe. Feudalism arose because the Roman Empire had collapsed, asshole bandit warlords demanded protection money from farmers that could now no longer rely on a centralized state to maintain order and only the wealthiest (nobles) could afford the best horses and top of the line armor. With horses out of the picture, that means knights no longer dominate the battlefield and it's all about infantry. Thus the "knights" of that world would have a much lower financial barrier to entry. As a result we'd see gendarmes pop up a lot earlier. Nobles would still exist, but their relative power would be a lot weaker compared to our feudal Europe.

Mules are half horse.

I doubt donkeys and camels would pack the punch to fully replace horses on the field of battle. They'd be great pack animals and beasts of burden though, so farming wouldn't be too different I imagine. Elephants are one hell of a warbeast. I guess you could have a smaller but even more powerful elephant-centric elite if the climate allows it?

You do know zebra's are tamed and not domesticated, right? What you're doing is the equivalent of me posting that one American guy who lives in a cabin with his bear in response to a "what would antiquity without dogs look like?" thread.

>Did just fine
>barely scratching the bottom of pre-metal age fertile crescent while the rest of the world is starting the very first steps to industrialization
>extinct without any trace

Actually their main problem was that they never independently discovered iron working. Not that it helped the Chinese or the Bantu much.

Nothing says Zebra can't be domesticated. We did it horses and we did it with foxes and we're doing it with hyenas.

>Nothing says Zebra can't be domesticated.
Except the fact that even fucking zebroids are unruly as fuck.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebroid#Physical_characteristics
Don't go full /pol/ on me.

>We did it with foxes
In the Soviet Union, in the 20th century, mostly to prove a point (muh Lyshenkoism). Do I actually have to explain why the circumstances of the 20th century Soviet Union were different than those of medieval Europe when it comes to selective breeding of non-domesticated species? The fact that the project was cancelled because it was too expensive should also explain why /pol/ should stop bringing this example up.

Zebra lack the social structure and temperament of horses, they really can't be domesticated.

>Except the fact that even fucking zebroids are unruly as fuck.
> the Soviet Union, in the 20th century, mostly to prove a point (muh Lyshenkoism).

The soviets did it over fifty years.

low tech settings can do it over tens of thousands of years.

Ok, I'll come out and say it.

What if they bred human slaves as pack-animals?

>Actually their main problem was that they never independently discovered iron working. Not that it helped the Chinese or the Bantu much.

I've thought about this on occasion, but I don't know enough about history to do anything with it.

What would our world be like if ironworking had been discovered by someone in the Americas and not in Eurasia? Would the lack of horse-like animals in the Americas just fuck everything up anyway?

Also what if camels hadn't crossed the land bridge and were still hanging out in the Americas after humans settled that region

I'd imagine that to manage ironworking on a large scale, you'd need hauling animals of some kind to make it efficient in any way.

Meant to respond to

Aside from some alternate history wonking I've never played with the idea of native americans having iron much. It probably would have made them at least somewhat harder to conquer though, although most of the killing was done either by proxy or by biological warfare.

Breed bigger pigs and ride them?

Or live along a big river.

>although most of the killing was done either by proxy or by biological warfare.
I also had a thought a few years ago that if the Nordic explorers made more inroads than they did IRL, would it have been possible for the humans of the Americas to become acclimated to Old World diseases (in this case "acclimated" meaning "the ones with natural resistance didn't die off and were able to repopulate to pre-contact numbers") in time to meet the main push of conquest that began in the 1600s?

The aztecs made a venice like metropoli that somehow accomodated 12 million people comfortably and despite not having beasts of burden or using the wheel on anything but toys sustained a 20M people empire for close to a century.

They had a MUCH later start. Even if they had iron and horses, Eurasia would still have had much larger denser population pools, hence a nastier disease package.

In the early Middle Ages the ox was much more common than the horse, except in war.

For what purpose?

Most of the killing was done before the Europeans even arrived.
Though maybe if they had horses and iron, the collapse could be avoided, who knows.

By the time smalpox arrived to america with Panfilo de Narvaez, Cortez had already defeated every aztec leader except Cuitlahuac and his personal army of 20K. Cortez had 300 spaniards, 200 defectors from Narvaez' troops and 40K native warriors left.

The aztec didnt lose because of technology or biology, the lost because they were assholes and made enemies of literally everyone else.

>How to get eaten by your mount

Wouldn't something that can fly be far more effective?

Flight is unnecessary. Speed and power are the most important thing.

Using giant elands

Yeah, bullshit. The Tupi-Guaranis traded with the Incas. As in had trade routes over two thousand miles long. Don't underestimate what a bunch of determined people can do even without technology - and domesticated beasts of burden is a technological advance.

You know they could barely support their own weight, they were so fragile? They mostly went extinct long before K/T, as they had evolved to fit some ridiculously specific environmental conditions that were changing with or without that asteroid.

It'd be inefficient but do-able

If you had magical breeding, it might work, but the default human form is not designed to carry heavy loads. You'd have an easy caste system in the making though.

>I doubt donkeys and camels would pack the punch to fully replace horses on the field of battle.
Then have smaller battles?

Or, I don't know, chariots?

The civilization in question would need to understand the process of breeding for domestication, but they'd also need to fundamentally reject the notion of human empathy in order to justify it to themselves, or else you start seeing internal conflict.

Beyond that, they'd likely get their initial stock from neighboring tribes, they'll certainly be accused of doing so whether they do or they don't, which will lead to external conflicts.

Just in general it's a very big project with a lot of pushback and relatively little returns.

War-hippo mounts, obviously.

>Camel cavalry were a common element in desert warfare throughout history, due in part to the animal's high level of adaptability.
>They provided a mobile element better suited to work and survive in an arid and waterless environment than the horses of conventional cavalry.
>The smell of the camel, according to Herodotus, alarmed and disoriented horses, making camels an effective anti-cavalry weapon.
Thank you Wikipedia.

Yeah, but he's saying that the Soviets had different tools. There was a body of knowledge, about about animal husbandry and operant conditioning and basic animal neuroscience; and a world superpower's government had put a serious (VERY serious for the scientists whose careers and possibly lives were on the line) mandate behind it.

That's like saying that humans had tens of thousands of years to design artesian wells. It's not that simple; you have to have a body of knowledge and the motivation to do a specific thing like that. If an animal can't be practically domesticated after several attempts, locals are probably just going to decide it can't be done and move on. Zebras being a great example: sure, we COULD domesticate them, given enough time and effort, but is it really practical or worthwhile? It clearly wasn't for thousands of years, hence why they didn't.

Have you ever heard of donkeys pulling chariots? I assume not. I haven't. There's a reason for that.

Cameloids originated in the Americas, and still live there.

...

Coconuts are tropical. What if the civilization was in a temperate zone?

They could be carried; the swallow flies south in winter.

Well, that is what a complex civilization tends to do. Building a big city doesn't make you not a violent savage. Just look at the dark elves.

>unruly as fuck
yes, witch is why humans have only domesticated calm and reasonable animals like hogs and lamas

People use dinosaurs instead. Yeah there are dinosaurs, fuck you it's fantasy.

But flying would get you places faster on account of outright bypassing difficult terrain.

Still wouldn't work because you'd need constant exposure and/or reinfection to "yearly" strains to maintain resistance. Take syphilis for example.

It was present in both hemispheres before contact but over time the local strain(s) in each had "settled down" in their respective populations. People still caught it but it killed over decades. When both strains met, however, the result was a super-strain the populations in neither hemisphere had any resistance against. The new strain killed in days.

If the Norse bring over a 1000AD smallpox strain and then no further contact is maintained, you'll have a situation like that with smallpox. Each hemisphere's smallpox strain will diverge from the other, each population will build up resistance to their particular strain, and each population will have no resistance against the other hemipshere's strain.

Let me recommend Preston's "The Hot Zone" for a more thorough explanation of how diseases and epidemics work.

>12 million people comfortably

Using cannibalism to provide protein doesn't count as "comfortably".

Donkeys are a smaller, domesticated, variant of the Ongar, or Asiatic Wild Ass, which may well have been used for such...

African or European swallow?

They were used for chariots.

Flying creatures can't pull carts or plows

We have several options here user.

We can use camels

We can use other equine

We could breed big deer. Horses started out as big as dik-diks, we can upside deer too.

We could breed skinny rhinos. Fuck yeah with big ass rhino cavalry

Slowly.

Use Cows.

More trouble than its worth I'd say you'd barley go faster and you'd carry less shit than if you just had some one walk with you or something like a sedan chair

You can ride a cow pretty fine to be honest and they taste better

It's less about speed, more about carrying capacity.
Why else did the early explorers in those parts of africa that weren't suited to using horses and wagons ( Rainforest/Jungle Tsetse fly belt) use large numbers of native "bearers/porters" to carry their equipment?

>The fact that the project was cancelled because it was too expensive
Actually it's still going. They fund it by selling pet foxes.

Or something similar.

Pic didn't load.

Ok wtf.

>Except the fact that even fucking zebroids are unruly as fuck.

Then you take the two least unruly zebras you can get your hands on and breed those, then breed the kids with other docile zebras. This is domestication 101 man

Axebeaks, or horseclaws, or chocobos; whatever you want to call your giant domesticated therapod-esque bird of burden (birden).

>least unruly
Or rather, most ruly.

I feel bad at how wrong this post is.

Lesson from the fox experiment: domestication is just selecting for neoteny.
Basically creating perpetual childs, with low aggro and reliance on parents/authority.

It require not to be dumb as a rock and a sliver of social behavior, but not much more.

Feel free to wonder what that makes us human beings.

That's not an argument, your airhead.

You could list your criteria for cultural complexity, that would be interesting.

Slave-drawn carts.

>Feel free to wonder what that makes us human beings.
Same as ever.
Soulless machines.

user was probably referring to the tribes in what would become the U.S. and Canada.

EMU CAVALRY

Rubbing your shit on tanned animal hides isn't complex.

How about you propose yours as you're the one asserting that your murderous savages are really byzantine and ordered.

>>barely scratching the bottom of pre-metal age fertile crescent while the rest of the world is starting the very first steps to industrialization
IRL is not civ, technologies don't fall out of the sky like heavenly mana, its a complex set of requirments and availability of resources. Shit the thread almost proves it: Horses are an incredibly lucky thing to have been domesticated and it helped, even slightly, in the larger side of things.

I mean imagine if greece hadn't had one autistic higher up with tons of free time who popularized being good at math. We'd barely been out of the dark ages or even been in them to begin with. There's so many things that could've gone wrong.
>>extinct without any trace
Not a cultural or racial thing, they were sacked, burned and threwn to the wind.

Also there's several traces of them, even if they were basically attempted to be deleted

>user was probably referring to the tribes in what would become the U.S. and Canada.
Yes

>thinks the real world is civ 4 and the country highest up on the tech tree is the best

Honestly, it's hard for us to know what civs were like in pre-Columbus North America since 80-90% were killed off due to plagues before contact. What we ran into afterwards were similar to what feral tribes would be around after a continent wide plague now.

My own setting is a little more high fantasy, but most people use domesticated giant reindeer, rams and giant doggos as pack animals and mounts. They're herbivores that survive well in the cold without requiring as much land to graze. Since most of the continent is a boreal forest/tundra, I don't have cattle either.

Pretty much this. Look at the de Soto expedition for example. It came ashore in Florida, then spent the next 3 years or so wandering around between the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, etc., touring most of the US southeast on foot until the survivors stumbled back to Mexico. There were a couple hundred men, about the same number of camp followers, horses, even a herd of cattle and swine. Every single person, plus the animals, might as well have been walking bioweapons as far the locals were concerned.

De Soto's men reported that the region was densely populated, had agricultural villages within sight of each, stockaded hill top towns, trade networks, translators, you name. They even fought a pitched battle in Alabama when a local chief refused to trade for food which involved storming a fortified town. About eighty years later French explorers reached the same region from the north and found NOTHING. Villages and towns were either abandoned or rotted away with what few people still around living as hunter-gatherers. All the diseases de Soto's expedition brought in, plus diseases spread by sporadic coastal contacts, had swept through the region multiple times.

It was must the same thing in New England before the Pilgrims blundered ashore. Trading contact with European ships had decimated the locals. The Pilgrims found cleared land to settle because the people who had been working it had died 10 or 20 years earlier and the forest had grown back yet.

The Amazon got hammered too. Some poor SOB crossed it from the Andes to the Atlantic again reporting dense populations, settled towns, etc. By the time someone else showed up, most everyone was dead and the jungle had swallowed up everything. It's only in the last few decades or so that we've found archeological and other evidence that the 1st report was right.

Thanks to the Columbian Exchange, North and South America were basically Mad Max: The Continents.

damn, you forget sometimes just how fragile humans are
makes you wonder what were those couple decades like. Everyone you know dying, everything you knew crumbling to dust. Scary shit

Use camels instead.

It'd be some Dark Souls shit for sure, same goes for living during the black death.

>tfw a game about surviving during the last days of that civilization, fighting your used to be neighbors for the last scraps of food, reminiscing about your world becoming dust, until you contact the disease and start hallucinating spirits and gods of your dying culture coming into the world to condemn it to it's final death
when

>Scary shit

To say the least. Add a prescientific mindset to the mix and is any wonder the various locals actually worshiped European for brief periods? Everyone they know is dying and the newcomers aren't even affected. "Obviously" the gods must favor them.

And it just wasn't "one big plague" either. It was multiple diseases arriving at different times, killing, in different ways, and then returning over and over again. There's an account of a tribe in Texas just fading away between the 1820s to 40s. Ever year is seems they were continually hammered by whatever disease was passing through until there are no more records of them.

Once ashore, the diseases just slowly swept across the continents too. In 1775, there was a smallpox outbreak among the Continental Army outside of Boston. Washington contained it by ordering a mass inoculation, but it still "moved on" into the interior. Over 20 years later, US fur traders who'd sailed the Pacific Northwest "met" the same smallpox outbreak which had been slowly burning it's way across North America. Lewis & Clark ran into it at the Mandan villages even later as it rebounded back.

The entire pacific northwest was like extremely active. Trade was very common between tribes- completely without horses. You're also forgetting the Olmecs, the various Muskogean civilizations and empires that sprung up over time (again, without horses).

The Kwakwaka'wakw were part of that Pacific Northwest group. There was a ton of contact between the tribes in that region, and it's really not hard to see it.

They really didn't- it didn't quite look like European trade though, and even then "European trade" didn't look the same at any given period of time between different parts of Europe.

Seems like you'd want to build a lot of smaller societies that were within walking distance of one another to form trade networks that way, at least if you were trying to justify it in fantasy. I don't really know the specifics of how it worked in the pre-contact Americas.

Damn, those poor motherfuckers never had a chance

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