I always wondered how first animals domesticated were domesticated. Maybe, their newborns are taken away from the mother and brought up by humans?
Second question, how easy would it be for someone to grab a mature wolf living and hunting on mountain areas and have him/her domesticated?
There’s speculation that dogs and cats may have “self-domesticated”. Wolves, for example, might have started following humans around to scavenge after their kills (not unlike some species of birds follow large ungulates around). Those wolves who were less aggressive and less fearful of humans would have been better able to feed themselves in this way, and so would have been better able to reproduce. Wild cats may evolved into a similar symbiotic relationship with humans once the first permanent settlements were founded, by preying on the vermin who were hanging around the granaries; the ones who weren’t as skittish around humans would have had plenty of mice to eat. In both cases, there would have been an evolutionary pressure towards less aggression and fear of humans, resulting (after many generations) in the furry lumps who sleep on our couches.
As for herd animals, I think people started by following the herds. They probably also protected the herds from competing predators, and drove them to good sources of food and water. Herds that tolerated people flourished.
Eventually, people took to selecting the males they wanted to breed, and castrating the others, or segregating them from the females come breeding season.
No, I don’t think you can “domesticate” a grown wolf. I think that requires a few generations of breeding. You might be able to tame a particular wolf, though.
Sheep and some other animals are fairly passive anyway, grab them while they’re young, raise them and you’ve got something fairly domesticated. For livestock the problem would be keeping them, so animals that can be tethered or kept inside a stockade already built for human protection.
I have no idea when anyone got the idea but waterfowl would be easy to domesticate, raised from eggs they’ll just follow humans around and you can yank out some flight feathers and they won’t go anywhere fast.
But were their ancestors passive? Remember, we’re not talking about the animals we know today. The auroch, from which the domestic cow comes from, for instance, wasn’t passive, for instance.
I don’t know. The females of some species are more passive than the males, but grabbing passive females doesn’t finish up the process of domestication, you need males to get new generations. I am sure the process must have started with something smaller and less dangerous than aurochs. No clue how they got that first bull.
Yeah … all we have is speculation …
Furthering MikeS’ post, these wolves that followed the humans would also “alarm” during the night when leopards or T. rex’ were about, so humans start leaving behind foodstuffs to encourage the wolves to hang around.
Another theory is that wolves hung around the garbage piles humans like to create. When a human went to dump more on, only the smart wolves ran away, leaving the stupid ones behind to be domesticated.
There’s a question about the “taking a wolf cub and raising it” theory. It seems unlikely that mesolithic humans had the abundance of leisure time and extra foodstuffs for such a direct domestication process. The idea of some flathead-raised girl just picking up a cub and it become immediately Rover is preposterous.
As to the second question, the work done to domestic the Silver Fox would lead one to believe that … no … it takes several generations of selective breeding to bring about the tameness and social behaviors to say an animal is domesticated.
House cats are a little different story. DNA evidence indicates that all house cats today are descended from just 5 individual Libyan Wild Cats. The theory is that they just kinda showed up and the humans tolerated their presence because of all the mice and rats they were eating. These wild cats appear to have discovered that they could implant thoughts into young women’s brains and thus started to domesticate humans to serve their every need to the point that cats were worshiped as gods in ancient Egypt. No one is sure when the horrible human mutation of “dog-loving” occurred, but it has proven to be near impossible to breed out.
This makes a lot of sense, humans would benefit during this process by eating the culls.
I’ve heard this theory about about wild cats living alongside human communities. Humans would build granaries to store food. Mice and rats would infest the granaries because of the food supply we were making available. Wild cats would then start living in the granaries because the mice and rats were providing them with a food supply. This would go on for generations and you’d end up with cats which were theoretically feral but which had grown up in human communities.
This seems plausible to me. I’ve worked on farms that were full of “barn cats” that lived like this.
It’s possible it was priests rather than children who were raising the puppies. Tribes who were familiar with wolves may have classified them as ceremonial animals and priests may have sought to tame some wolves for them to participate in religious ceremonies.
I’ve read that hunter-gatherers tend to rear baby animals as pets all the time. I think it was in a Jared Diamond book. At any rate, the text went on to say that most of those animals are eventually eaten. But “let’s raise this little animal sorta like a child and see what happens” seems to be an innate part of human behavior. (at least for some humans)
A kitten’s face has similarities to a human infant face, or so it’s said. There might be an 'endearment" factor here that could speed the process along. I’ve seen what a gaggle of 10-year-old girls can do to a kitten. He grew up to be a fine house cat, one of the best I’ve known. It’s not that big of a stretch to imagine such in antiquity.
Raising animals as pets may have been the start. For livestock even if they’re not very tame as adults they may lose their fear of humans and become easy prey later, possibly leaving more wild offspring to raise. So the concept of domestication through breeding may have arisen from a simpler cycle that didn’t require enclosures or breeding.
Jared Diamond discusses domestication of animals (and plants) extensively in Guns, Germs and Steel.
What is truly amazing is how some animals are domesticable, but others not, despite outward similarity. Horses and zebras are a great example. Horses were domesticated, but the best you can do with zebras is to *tame *them.
Also see Dog Sense by John Bradshaw.
He discusses domestication of dogs at length. He makes many of the points raised upthread. He also takes great pains to dismantle theories of dog behavior comparing them to “wolves in sheeps clothing”- he sees them as quite distinct.
In a nutshell, his argument states that dogs are a lineage of the most domesticable wolves, and that after centuries of being hunted by humans, currently extant wild wolves are the opposite- wild wolves are descendants of the “wildest” (most avoidant of humans) of ancient wolves.
He also takes issue with older published wolf literature, which was based on “artificial” packs of wolves thrown together in various parks and preserves; these packs tended to have aggressively established hierarchies (alpha male, etc). More recent research on naturally developing packs shows them to be extended family units. The alpha male and female are simply the parent/grandparents to the other wolves. in this view, “lower ranked” adults can be considered equivalent to adult humans living on in the household (perhaps in the basement), providing services (hunting and childcare for younger siblings) in exchange for the benefits of living with the group.
I realize that this is meant to be a joke but I correct the error in case of the presence of impressionable, naive minds —
The plural of “Rex” is “Rexes”
Singular: Rex
Singular possessive: Rex’s
Plural: Rexes
Plural possessive: Rexes’
The plural of Rex would be Reges.
Only if you’re speaking Latin. T. Rex is an English word now.
I hope Ken Ham knows that. It would be terribly mis-educational if his museum showed a group of paleolithic auroch-herders riding T. Reces or Rexen or however else it might be mis-spelt.
New candy name: T. Reces Pieces.
As for the OP, you might want to do a search. This has been discussed half a dozen times on this MB over the years.
I’m currently reading guns germs and steel. it doesn’t go into extensive detail but if you are interested in the topic in general it is a must read. It is very very good for talking about how humans in general developed agriculture and the tools that came along with it and the weapons that followed. It also explains why certain areas did not develop. Basically, if you don’t have wild rice or wild wheat nearby, you will not be able to transition to an agricultural society. Similarly if you do not have copper and iron in the ground/hills near where you live you will not be able to make tools or weapons out of those materials. Very simple ideas when you think about it, so simple in fact, it gets overlooked in most narratives of history.
There is a video as well but I have not seen it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojU31yHDqiM