Pack animal in the context of "Mule"

Road transport or road transportation is a type of transport using roads. Transport on roads can be roughly grouped into the transportation of goods and transportation of people. In many countries licensing requirements and safety regulations ensure a separation of the two industries. Movement along roads may be by bike, automobile, bus, truck, or by animal such as horse or oxen. Standard networks of roads were adopted by Romans, Persians, Aztec, and other early empires, and may be regarded as a feature of empires. Cargo may be transported by trucking companies, while passengers may be transported via mass transit. Commonly defined features of modern roads include defined lanes and signage. Various classes of road exist, from two-lane local roads with at-grade intersections to controlled-access highways with all cross traffic grade-separated.

The nature of road transportation of goods depends on, apart from the degree of development of the local infrastructure, the distance the goods are transported by road, the weight and volume of an individual shipment, and the type of goods transported. For short distances and light small shipments, a van or pickup truck may be used. For large shipments even if less than a full truckload a truck is more appropriate. (Also see Trucking and Hauling below). In some countries cargo is transported by road in horse-drawn carriages, donkey carts or other non-motorized mode. Delivery services are sometimes considered a separate category from cargo transport. In many places, fast food is transported on roads by various types of vehicles. For inner city delivery of small packages and documents bike couriers are quite common.

A caravanserai (or caravansary; /kærəˈvænsəˌraɪ/) was an inn that provided lodging for travelers, merchants, and caravans. They were present throughout much of the Islamic world. Depending on the region and period, they were called by a variety of names including khan, funduq and wikala. Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information, and people across the network of trade routes covering Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe, most notably the Silk Road. In the countryside, they were typically built at intervals equivalent to a day's journey along important roads, where they served as a kind of staging post. Urban versions of caravanserais were historically common in cities where they could serve as inns, depots, and venues for conducting business.

The buildings were most commonly rectangular structures with one protected entrance. Inside, a central courtyard was surrounded by an array of rooms on one or more levels. In addition to lodgings for people, they often included space to accommodate horses, camels, and other pack animals, as well as storage rooms for merchandise.

The Sahelian kingdoms were a series of centralized kingdoms or empires that were centered on the Sahel, the area of grasslands south of the Sahara, from the 8th century to the 19th. The wealth of the states came from controlling the trade routes across the desert. Their power came from having large pack animals like camels and horses that were fast enough to keep a large empire under central control and were also useful in such kind of battle. All of these empires were also quite decentralized with member cities having a great deal of autonomy.

The Sahel states were limited from expanding south into the forest zone of the Bono and Yoruba as mounted warriors were all but useless in the forests and the horses and camels could not survive the diseases of the region.

In biology, a hybrid is the offspring resulting from combining the qualities of two organisms of different varieties, subspecies, species or genera through sexual reproduction. Generally, it means that each cell has genetic material from two different organisms, whereas an individual where some cells are derived from a different organism is called a chimera. Hybrids are not always intermediates between their parents such as in blending inheritance (a now discredited theory in modern genetics by particulate inheritance), but can show hybrid vigor, sometimes growing larger or taller than either parent. The concept of a hybrid is interpreted differently in animal and plant breeding, where there is interest in the individual parentage. In genetics, attention is focused on the numbers of chromosomes. In taxonomy, a key question is how closely related the parent species are.

Species are reproductively isolated by strong barriers to hybridization, which include genetic and morphological differences, differing times of fertility, mating behaviors and cues, and physiological rejection of sperm cells or the developing embryo. Some act before fertilization and others after it. Similar barriers exist in plants, with differences in flowering times, pollen vectors, inhibition of pollen tube growth, somatoplastic sterility, cytoplasmic-genic male sterility and the structure of the chromosomes. A few animal species and many plant species, however, are the result of hybrid speciation, including important crop plants such as wheat, where the number of chromosomes has been doubled.

A folk taxonomy is a vernacular naming system, as distinct from scientific taxonomy. Folk biological classification is the way people traditionally describe and organize the world around them, typically making generous use of form taxa such as "shrubs", "bugs", "ducks", "fish", "algae", "vegetables", or of economic criteria such as "game animals", "pack animals", "weeds" and other like terms.

Folk taxonomies are generated from social knowledge and are used in everyday speech. They are distinguished from scientific taxonomies that claim to be disembedded from social relations and thus more objective and universal. Folk taxonomies exist to allow popular identification of classes of objects, and apply to all subsections of human activity. All parts of the world have their own systems of naming local plants and animals. These naming systems are a vital aid to survival and include information such as the fruiting patterns of trees and the habits of large mammals. These localised naming systems are folk taxonomies. The ancient naturalist Theophrastus recorded evidence of a Greek folk taxonomy for plants, but later formalized botanical taxonomies were laid out in the 18th century by Carl Linnaeus.

The llama (/ˈlɑːmə/; Spanish pronunciation: [ˈʎama] or [ˈʝama]) (Lama glama) is a domesticated South American camelid, widely used as a meat and pack animal by Andean cultures since the pre-Columbian era.

Llamas are social animals and live with others as a herd. Their wool is soft and contains only a small amount of lanolin. Llamas can learn simple tasks after a few repetitions. When using a pack, they can carry about 25 to 30% of their body weight for 8 to 13 km (5–8 miles). The name llama (also historically spelled "lama" or "glama") was adopted by European settlers from native Peruvians.

The Karakoram Pass (Uyghur: قاراقۇرۇم ئېغىزى) is a 5,540 m or 18,176 ft mountain pass between India and China in the Karakoram Range. It is the highest pass on the ancient caravan route between Leh in Ladakh and Yarkand in the Tarim Basin. The name 'Karakoram' comes from a Turkic language meaning 'Black Gravel'.

Historically, the high altitude of the pass and the lack of fodder were responsible for the deaths of countless pack animals while the route was notorious for the trail of bones strewn along the way. There is an almost total absence of vegetation on the approaches to the pass.

The donkey or ass is a domesticated equine. It derives from the African wild ass, Equus africanus, and may be classified either as a subspecies thereof, Equus africanus asinus, or as a separate species, Equus asinus. It was domesticated in Africa some 5000–7000 years ago, and has been used mainly as a working animal since that time.

There are more than 40 million donkeys in the world, mostly in underdeveloped countries, where they are used principally as draught or pack animals. While working donkeys are often associated with those living at or below subsistence, small numbers of donkeys or asses are kept for breeding, as pets, and for livestock protection in developed countries.

Mountain warfare or alpine warfare is warfare in mountains or similarly rough terrain. The term encompasses military operations affected by the terrain, hazards, and factors of combat and movement through rough terrain, as well as the strategies and tactics used by military forces in these situations and environments.

Mountain ranges are of strategic importance since they often act as a natural border and may also be the origin of a water source such as the Golan Heights. Attacking a prepared enemy position in mountain terrain generally requires a greater ratio of attacking soldiers to defending soldiers than a war conducted on level ground. Mountains present natural hazards such as lightning, strong gusts of wind, rockfalls, avalanches, snowpacks, ice, extreme cold, and glaciers with their crevasses; in these ways, it can be similar to cold-weather warfare. The generally uneven terrain and the slow pace of troop and material movements are additional threats to combatants. Movement, reinforcements, and medical evacuation up and down steep slopes and areas in which even pack animals cannot reach involves an enormous exertion of energy.