It’s not really directly relevant to them. Domestication is occuring well after H.s.s is out and about. I don’t see they have a dog in this fight unless some ludicrously early domestication date came out of Australia.
I would think that would depend on the target environment. Certainly West Africa, for example, poses serious problems.
Well, since there seem to have been two domestication events, what you actually seem to be looking at is slow, step by step adaption over time, through combined human and natural effort.
But note we don’t need to assume a wide trading network per se as opposed to slow, accidental diffusion through an interwoven net of smaller trade/exchange networks. Same kind of percolation process which kept us one nice little species.
I like the way you put that, Jois. Actually, no one seems to know for sure, but the best guess is that about 2,000,000 years ago, the climate “burped.” There have been ice ages around since just before the Cambrian. Well, what about 2,000,000 years ago: Mindel-Riss times or thereabouts? Climates all over the palce began to get – relatively speaking – suddenly cooler. As a result, a lot of equilibria were punctuated. Are you familiar with that theory?
Anyway, as to how it all got around, that depends on whether you subscribe to the Multiregional or Out of Africa theory.
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Skulldiger, as you can see, is taking the long view on this one.
Myself, I see the changes of climate at the end of the Wurm/Wisconsin as helping precipitate the Neolithic Revolution. And in consequence, the establishment of “villic” culture (coining a term to mean based on villages, as opposed to nomadic encampments or extended-family settlements, on the one hand, and civilization as based on cities on the other).
With greater specialization of tasks, the need to communicate and preserve, the need to improve the quality of goods produced, and so on, became both more important and more do-able. Effectively, a “traditionalistic” worldview was gradually replaced by a “progressivistic” worldview through much of the area covered by the early civilizations – and led to the consequences you discuss.
We are also prone to see connections in coincidences. Did you ever see Gould’s essay on randomly generated arrays of dots and how one sees patterns in the random ones, not in the structured ones? Whereby the idea that the “Egyptian Sun-worshipping cultural evangelists who brought civilization to the rest of the world” (vide G. E. Smith) result from (1) the desire of neighboring civilizations to adopt neat useful ideas to which they were exposed – literally, “don’t reinvent the wheel”!! :D) combined with (2) the independent invention of the same sort of thing in a different place at much the same time, simply because culture has advanced to the place where such a thing becomes a useful adjunct to society.