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Throughout this book, we have traced horse culture form its steppe origins as it radiated out across Eurasia and North Africa to revolutionize Old World civilizations; in the preceding chapter we documented the impact of the warhorse on the New World, where the wild horse had long been extinct. In that the domesticated horse had influenced Old World cultures for nearly 6,000 years before it reached the Americas, it is almost as if there existed on the planet two experiments in human civilization—one horsed, the other horseless. It might therefore be instructive to compare the two hemispheres at time of contact in terms of the effects of horse presence and absence on the development of human culture. Then we might document the historical consequences of horse culture spreading to other horseless regions beyond the oceans, the horse’s diverse impact worldwide, and the pluses and minuses of the enduring horse legacy we carry with us into the modern mechanized era.

Hemispheres with and without Horses

In the Old World, agriculture, metallurgy, and circumscribed alluvial civilization all preceded horse domestication. All three developments occurred indigenously in the New World, although a little later in the Old.

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