4000–3000 BCE: (The Donkey as Catalyst for the Domestication of Camels and Possibly Horses: African Donkeys as the Likely Model and Impetus for the Subsequen…

4000–3000 BCE: (The Donkey as Catalyst for the Domestication of Camels and Possibly Horses: African Donkeys as the Likely Model and Impetus for the Subsequent Domestication of the Camel in Southwestern Asia for Riding and Transport, and the Possible Role of Donkey Knowledge Reaching the Pontic Steppes in the Fourth Millennium as an Impetus for Early Indo-Europeans to Begin Using the Horse for Riding and Carrying): The ramifications of African donkey domestication radiated far beyond the donkey itself. As the earliest animals to carry trade goods over distances and to pull vehicles, donkeys were the likely models and impetus for the subsequent domestication of an indigenous southwestern Asian animal, the camel, and for its use both for riding and in short- and long-distance transport. Ehret suggests it also seems possible that the arrival of at least knowledge of the donkey in the Pontic steppes sometime in the fourth millennium BCE may have served as an impetus for change among the early Indo-Europeans, who had used the horse as a meat source and began in that millennium to use it to carry people and goods. Think about what that chain of causation implies. If the domestication of horses for riding and transport was inspired even in part by the example of the domesticated donkey (an African animal, domesticated by African peoples), then the entire subsequent history of mounted warfare, cavalry empires, nomadic expansions, and the reshaping of the Eurasian steppe owes something fundamental to African innovation. The Indo-European migrations that restructured the linguistic map of Eurasia, the chariot warfare of the Hittites and Egyptians, the mounted archery of the Scythians and Mongols: all of it may trace part of its genealogy back to a Cushitic-speaking herder in Somaliland who first thought to put a load on the back of a wild ass. Africa did more than participate in world history. Africa set world history in motion.