Humans are a specie that invented pretty complicated and ridiculously impractical way of using horses in wars over 1000 years before they invented the most primitive saddle
Fun fact
Humans are a specie that invented pretty complicated and ridiculously impractical way of using horses in wars over 1000 years before they invented the most primitive saddle
*species
Specie is acceptable, if uncommon, as a singular form of species.
You under estimated the power of chariots to trample. Also, nice platform to perform on. Finally, good at shielding the legs. Why would you sit on a horse if you could have it pull a protected box with you in it?
It's a great system until you encounter anything other than dry flat ground.
Pretty interesting seeing depictions of early cavarly though. Some Egyptian paintings show one man controling the horse and one man riding backward with a bow
>It's a great system until you encounter anything other than dry flat ground.
Yes. That's where they were used. Flat ground.
Yeah, everybody knows that. The point is that it was a primitive, hilarious technology.
You have autism, btw.
I know, fuckstick, no reason to get snarky.
Assyrian cavalry did something similar, during the early Assyrian period they are depicted as pairing off with one rider shooting a bow while another with a spear and shield held his reins. It wasn’t until the end of the Assyrian Empire and the rise of the Neo-Assyrian empire that horses were big and trained enough for people to fight on, then they began being depicted as fighting on their own with spear, shield, sword, and bows.
It s also that as i remember the horses were smaller in egypt , and there they don t have a hill/mountain problem
>You under estimated the power of chariots to trample
chartiots were extremely lightweight and brittle. Just look at OPs image. They would just break if you smashed into anything. They were archery platforms.
>implying that saddles aren't pretty complex
Anon, early saddles were pad clothes, good enough and saddles aren't trivial or cheap, they're invented by iteration.
Chariots are simply lightweight carts and far later than these primitive cloth saddles.
It's simpler going from a cart to a chariot than from a cloth pad to a leather saddle like in roman times.
nagger you don't seem to understand that horses were early into domestication; they were the size of modern ponies and very skittish. It would take until the iron age for horses to be big and brave enough to ride.
This. It took a thousand years or more of breeding to make a horse big and strong enough to carry a rider anywhere but its hindquarters (which is a terribly awkward position to control a horse from, much less fight with one).
Wasn't there horse breeding going on? Horses got bigger over time. I know I read somewhere celts kept using chariots until relatively late because their horses were small
Fun fact: Op is a fucking homosexual.
Hundreds or thousands of years of selective breeding makes a huge difference, dumbass.
Ancient horses were not anywhere near as robust as modern horses, and modern horses still break their legs all the time just from putting their foot down the wrong way.
Wait til you see what they did with elephants
Elephant chariots?
Pompey the Great tried using a elephant chariot in his first triumph, but they were too big to fit through the city gates and the procession had to stop while they found a team of horses. It ended up being quite the political embarrassment for him.
A lot of selective breeding was necessary to create horses that can hold a man on its back, travel hundreds of miles and be riden into battle.
Horses back then still had pretty weak backs that couldn’t hold a man for more than a short time.
>Revolutionizes warfare
Not really. Alexander the Great cavalry conquered the world without stirrups
Which part of
>revolutionises
Did you not understand?
Alexanders companions cavalry revolutionised warfare so hard they conquered half of the world. Without stirrups. Skill issue/
>guns didn't revolutionize warfare because of muh Alexander
naggerbrain
guns?
Still had battles centered around heavy infantry and heavy infantry would remain the dominant focus of warfare until around Adrianople and the advent of the stirrup.
To be sure, cavalry was very important in some key battles and campaigns before then. It was decisive in many campaigns. So were archers.
But this doesn't negate the fact that after the stirrup the infantry becomes far less important on a grand scale. Mounted archers or mounted knights begin to dominate warfare and do so for a millennia. Heavy infantry start coming back later, around the time of bombards, but don't totally upstage the cavalry until firearms are introduced.
Horses still played a major role after this. Some campaigns were decided by mounted forces. Some battles by charges. But the focus because infantry and canons.
Only repeating actions truly BTFO horses. And better, more accurate explosives have slowly been supplanting infantry as artillery and airpower have since become the center of all warfare. Infantry function largely to spot and fix targets for these in many contexts. Drones can increasingly do this same work, so I think, in the long term, infantry and armor will become less and less relevant.
>t. Lynn Townsend White Jr.
that dude was full of shit and has probably never ridden a horse
That's not what i thought that was in the thumbnail.....
Fun fact: people who say "fun fact" are 10 times more likely to suck dick. Myself included
It feels good to drink milk and ride chariots my fellow PIE brothers
I'm going on a raid of the nearest anatolian farmer settlement, you guys need anything?
Praise be to Dyēus Phater for giving us this life.
it's hard to believe!
Actual wild horses have disappeared completely. All the current horses in the wild are just feral domesticated horses.
Based retard, Przewalski's horses
They literally went extinct in the wild and were later reintroduced
the word car comes from the ancient british word for chariot, which is pretty cool
>we wuz chariots and sheit
Pretty sure it's just a shorthand for "carriage"
Where do you think the word for carriage came from?
Chariots weren't impractical, they shit on infantry armies. Romans struggled with them in the form of savage anachronism when taking on the Br*ts long after the height of chariots as a military unit.
>over 1000 years before they invented the most primitive saddle
Retard.
Prehistoric horses were not good for riding on them, so there was no point.
People also forget what a pain in the ass domestication is. Some animals are better for it than others. There were multiple failed domestication attempts for horses, until one group managed to get it right. Same case for every other domestic animal.
Also zebras are skittish around people and aggressive as fuck, without a horse of your own or knowledge of horses good fucking luck domesticating those assholes. They injure more zookeepers per year than any other large mammal. naggers steered clear of trying to tame them because fuck that shit, and I don’t blame them.
>zebras are skittish around people and aggressive as fuck
zebras aren't suitable for riding as they are more related to donkeys than horses.
>muh fake anthropology
the soviet fox experiment proves you can have significant trait alterations within just 3 generations without random mutations or le evolution, just simple wild type selection.
doesn't take 1000 years to create a horse lineage, all the different types of warhorses in Yorop took less than 200 years to develop with selective breeding
You do realize that horses couldn't handle humans riding them before larger and stronger breeds were created, right?
it should be illegal for historians with no horse riding experience to talk about any horse related history