# Why were ancient American horses not domesticated for transportation purposes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 17, 2015, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877 "2015-10-17T04:07:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![TSBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/77aa72/32.png) [@TSBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TSBG)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2015, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/41 "2015-10-18T21:06:37Z")
Just wanted to add that even if the wild horses found by the migrants to North America were a bit smaller than modern horses, humans were smaller too. Had they been domesticated they would have been been easily able to carry a rider. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2015, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/42 "2015-10-18T21:14:12Z")
> [@TSBG](#): > > Just wanted to add that even if the wild horses found by the migrants to North America were a bit smaller than modern horses, humans were smaller too. Umm, no. Humans were _[larger](http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race)_. We’ve shrunk a bit as a result of adopting agriculture. ---
**Author:** ![TSBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/77aa72/32.png) [@TSBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TSBG)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2015, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/43 "2015-10-18T21:21:19Z")
Unless I missed it, that article does not say ancient hunter-gatherers were larger than modern humans. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2015, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/44 "2015-10-18T21:45:27Z")
> [@TSBG](#): > > Unless I missed it, that article does not say ancient hunter-gatherers were larger than modern humans. 😕 "One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9’’ for men, 5’ 5’’ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3’’ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. “Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.” ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/45 "2015-10-19T02:17:27Z")
Any comment on the idea that it was the development of herding that made horses useful as mounts? ---
**Author:** ![TSBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/77aa72/32.png) [@TSBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TSBG)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/46 "2015-10-19T02:54:44Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > 😕 > > "One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9’’ for men, 5’ 5’’ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3’’ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. > > Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. “Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.” Thanks, that didn’t read like a blanket statement to me that current humans are smaller/same size as hunter-gatherers that preceded agriculture; though when I read it again it does seem like that could be implicit. Would still like something clearer, but I’m not, like, passionately invested in the notion that we’re bigger/they’re smaller. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/47 "2015-10-19T06:21:23Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Any comment on the idea that it was the development of herding that made horses useful as mounts? Much early herding - sheep, goats, etc. - did not involve horses generally. Dogs who herd (sheep0 are using part of their innate hunting skills, where they “direct” animals. Where you see horse used for herding most often, is when herding cattle where the size and speed of the horse (and avoiding being trampled) makes them much more valuable. But despite general similarities, riding cattle is rarely done. (However, they were used to pull wagons) I wonder if domesticating horses coincided with the introduction of agriculture to the Ukraine? People who could stay in one place for an extended period during annual migrations might take that interlude of “stay time” to corral wild horses? Or, the other way around - when they first sowed fields of wheat, expecting to return in the fall to harvest, they quickly learned they had to fence out the wild horses and other grazers. Maybe the few people left behind discovered that in some cases, once the horses got in a field, they could not get out. Also, how does horse sex figure into this? As I understand, there are two types of herds - a stallion with a harem of mares, and the adolescent males and those who fail to win a harem. Trapping the harem, killing the stallion after mating season, and wait out the cycle and you get a group of relatively more peaceful mares and a fresh round colts, of new horses for next year. Each year, let one stallion in to mate and repeat. Oddly, I don’t understand to what extent llamas were put to work by the South Americans, but never bred or used for riding, while equally tiny burros (small donkeys?) were used that way in Eurasia. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/48 "2015-10-19T12:18:51Z")
For the most part, llamas aren’t capable of safely carrying the weight of an average adult human. We’ve probably bred some large/strong enough by this point, but they’re exceptional. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2015, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/49 "2015-10-19T13:45:39Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > Much early herding - sheep, goats, etc. - did not involve horses generally. Dogs who herd (sheep0 are using part of their innate hunting skills, where they “direct” animals. Where you see horse used for herding most often, is when herding cattle where the size and speed of the horse (and avoiding being trampled) makes them much more valuable. But despite general similarities, riding cattle is rarely done. (However, they were used to pull wagons) I was thinking more in terms of migration, in being able to follow the herds. Nomadic peoples can travel on foot just fine, but if you have to keep up with a herd that must continually move on, horses help a lot. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/50 "2015-10-20T02:55:07Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > There is also the fact that actual horsemanship was hindered by the lack of stirrups. Those features seem completely obvious today because it is difficult to mount or control a horse without stirrups yet they simply didn’t exist in the vast majority of antiquity. The Roman empire relied heavily on horses yet they did they did not even have modern saddles to support them. > > … > > As to the question in the OP, containing let alone domesticating any horses is difficult even today. They are prey animals and take a lot of work, time (and money in today’s terms) to get used to human contact. There is a reason why horse ownership is mainly a rich person’s game today. They aren’t dogs and they cost a whole lot more than they are worth unless it is very specific and controlled circumstances. > > [Stirrup - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirrup) Horses were domesticated more than a thousand years before the stirrup. Lots of people today ride without stirrups, it’s called bareback riding. It is not hard to mount a horse or control a horse without stirrups (stirrups do not control a horse in any way). What the invention of stirrups did was revolutionize _warfare_, not riding. Once you had a saddle with stirrups, you had something to brace a lance against. You could much more easily wield a sword because of the increased stability of your seat. Another thing to consider is that the pre-stirrup horses were a lot shorter than most modern horses, shorter than many modern ponies. Look at those Greek friezes with the warriors’ legs dangling almost to the ground, that wasn’t artistic license. 40 years ago in the western US, cheap horses were cheaply kept by semi-rural children in their back field. I was one of them. This is not usually possible today, but it certainly was then. The reason you can’t do that now is mainly because it is so damn crowded. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/51 "2015-10-20T03:08:57Z")
Horses and humans still live in what might be an archetypal relationship in nomadic Mongolia, where a family ‘keeps’ a herd of horses, without confining them in any way or feeding them anything much. When they want to ride they go look for the herd, which is apparently not prone to wander extremely far away (possibly because stallions are territorial and keep their harems within the bounds of their own area). Then they simply catch the horses they want and ride them. I just read about this somewhere scientific online. It seems very probable that such herds were kept originally for food, riding came later. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/52 "2015-10-20T03:18:00Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > I was thinking more in terms of migration, in being able to follow the herds. Nomadic peoples can travel on foot just fine, but if you have to keep up with a herd that must continually move on, horses help a lot. No, horses can move a lot faster than sheep and goats. Also, you only have to move the herd when they run out of grass where they are, which can be a very short distance. It’s more like a slow drift than a march. The big moves would be from lower winter pastures to higher summer pastures and back again – twice a year. All a horse really does for this kind of herding is give you a tall place to sit. You would very rarely use a horse to influence the movement of flocks of sheep and goats – a dog is ten times as efficient. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/53 "2015-10-20T03:39:05Z")
Yep. You want a man on a horse for herding cattle, but for sheep you send out 10 year old boy with a stick. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/54 "2015-10-20T04:06:26Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#): > > Horses were domesticated more than a thousand years before the stirrup. Thousand **s** , just to be clear. Stirrups were a pretty late innovation relatively speaking, probably coming out of China and spreading west across the steppe until it reached Europe in the ~7th century A.D… > [@](#): > > What the invention of stirrups did was revolutionize _warfare_, not riding. Once you had a saddle with stirrups, you had something to brace a lance against. You could much more easily wield a sword because of the increased stability of your seat. Yes, but probably more evolution than revolution. Stirrups are the best option, but other ways of bracing riders and lances were used pre-stirrup, like high-cantled saddles for the riders and saddle-loops for the lances. Shock cavalry ( Alexander, Persian cataphracts ) long pre-dated the stirrup. ---
**Author:** ![Kevbo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/e47774/32.png) [@Kevbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kevbo)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/55 "2015-10-20T14:54:22Z")
It is worth noting that horses take a lot longer to domesticate than say, dogs. A mare can only produce one offspring per year or so, and you don’t know how it turned out for several more years. And you need big fences to control which stallion breeds which mare, so if you are a nomadic people, you are not going to have much of a breeding program going on. Horses are really useful to nomadic people, so the people with the most interest in domestication have the least means to make it happen. This makes transportation animals quite distinct from cows and goats and sheep. ---
**Author:** ![JR\_Brown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d6d6ee/32.png) [@JR\_Brown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JR_Brown)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2015, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877/56 "2015-10-20T20:06:45Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > I’ve listened to a stadium demonstration of a horse whisperer taming and saddleing a horse in about 30 minutes. A skill that would have been very valuable to some of our ancestors, but apparently wasn’t ever really developed. > > An interesting point is that, on an ad-hock basis, there were people who gentled their horse instead of breaking it, because I’ve read accounts of such. It just never became an efficient body of knowledge until recently. But these people are starting with individuals from feral populations of **domesticated** horses, that have undergone thousands of generations of selective breeding for docility; you can’t do that with the existing genuinely wild equine species (who are difficult to control as adults even if they’re been raised in captivity from birth), and there’s no reason to think wild equines 4000 years ago were that much different. I think the best-guess for domestication of horses at this point was that young animals that ended up being captured alive would be kept around as pets or as portable food stashes (as existing hunter-gatherers sometimes do), and eaten when they became too hard to handle. The few who remained docile into adulthood might get a chance to reproduce and leave a next generation of unusually-tractable babies, which over generations became tame enough to use for carrying/pulling/riding. The immigrating humans in the New World may not have had the sheer time to accomplish this because, as mentioned upthread, they wiped out the native equines pretty quickly after arrival. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-were-ancient-american-horses-not-domesticated-for-transportation-purposes/734877.md?page=2)