Which animal carried loads for people before the horse?

The donkey, domesticated from the African wild ass in north-east Africa around 5,000 to 6,000 years ago - some two thousand years before the horse. It was the first pack animal, and it is largely why long-distance overland trade was possible at all.

It is built for dry country in ways the horse is not. Donkeys tolerate dehydration that would kill a horse, can drink enough to recover in minutes, browse tough scrub a horse would refuse, and have far more careful footing on broken ground. What is read as stubbornness is a real behavioural difference: a horse's response to danger is to bolt, while a donkey's is to stop and assess, which is safer on a mountain path and infuriating if you are pulling on the rope.

Egyptian trade caravans ran on them, and a donkey cemetery excavated at Abydos held animals buried with royal honours, their bones showing the wear of a working life. There are still tens of millions of working donkeys, mostly in the poorest places, and they carry water and firewood for households where there is nothing else to do it - which makes the recent trade in donkey hides for traditional medicine a genuine crisis for people who own exactly one.