4000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
The donkey may have taught Eurasia to ride the horse and the camel
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The donkey was the first animal anywhere to carry trade goods over distance and to pull a vehicle, which made it a working model for others. Ehret argues it supplied both the example and the push for domesticating the camel in southwestern Asia, an animal then used for riding and for hauling over short and long stages. He goes further and suggests that word of the donkey reaching the Pontic steppes during the fourth millennium BCE may have prompted the early Indo-Europeans to stop treating the horse as a meat source and start loading it with people and goods. Follow that chain out. Mounted warfare, cavalry empires, the nomadic movements that redrew the map of Eurasia, the chariots of the Hittites, the bowmen of the Scythians and the Mongols: some part of that genealogy may run back to a herder in the Horn of Africa who first put a load on the back of a wild ass.
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