I’m halfway through Dawn, and it seems to be basically arguing these points:
People in pre-history should be assumed to be politically self-conscious, developing social and political systems that worked for them, as opposed to a sort of Darwinian idea that social structures were unwittingly developed at random, and certain ones flourished because they produced more calories per man hour.
Modern society was not the goal, nor the inevitable conclusion, of the process of human development. Societies were making choices based on what worked for them.
Pithy pat explanations are almost always wrong, because for every “just so” story about how civilizations develop, you can find a counter example.
Our evidence is heavily skewed toward certain sets of evidence because it happened to survive, happened to be discovered, and fits a narrative we are used to. That we have a tendency to treat new evidence as anomalous or exceptional when it contrasts with the things we “knew” about prehistory in previous generations. Our sense of the “norm” is distorted by what we found first. Even when the evidence is irrecoverable, we need to remember that we don’t have a complete picture and proceed with caution.
The domestication of animal species that would become livestock came with the advent of agriculture making hunting obsolete in those early agricultural societies.
Dogs predate agriculture, possibly by as much as 20,000 years. Horses, a much more recent domestication, likely originally were semi-domesticated by nomadic Eurasian tribes who lived more side by side with them, than the scenario we usually imagine – herd managers, etc. The evidence for this lies in modern Mongolia where this arrangement exists to this very day. The herds live very much as any wild herd lives, tolerating the presence of humans, who catch and ride them and then release them back into the herd. Horses were used for hunting large herbivores like wild cattle, managing semi-domesticated cattle (as they are still today in many places), and for warfare, and they were (and are) also eaten. Nomads aren’t farmers.
And even where people did derive a lot of their diet from farmed crops, I doubt that hunting was rendered obsolete in any area which still had huntable game; as opposed to becoming complementary to agriculture.
Certainly in what’s now New York State people combined agriculture with hunting for some 2,000 years; and farmers in this area, Native and otherwise, still hunt for some of their meat.
To me, this seems reasonable and mostly uncontroversial. Where it might be misleading, and I have not read the book, is where it assumes everybody thinks “social structures developed at random”, for example, despite having thousands of years to change what was not working well. No doubt people during the Reformation picked ideas to suit their worldview and had a slightly more incomplete knowledge of the past than we do. Graebar writes well and argues coherently (in other books of his I’ve read) but I am unsure to what extent this is a truly groundbreaking new view of the world. I will read it and see.
I don’t think it’s massively groundbreaking if you’ve been paying attention to developments in anthropology and archeology over the last 30 years. But most people haven’t, most people, if they know anything at all, were taught the standard “HG turn into farmers, farmers create surplus, surplus creates specialization, specialization creates cities, hierarchies, and war” and never questioned it at all. This book is aimed at high educated non-professionals, and for a lot of them, this is radical indeed.
It’s also true that the book is absolutely supporting the argument that large-scale anarchic societies are plausible, and as “natural” as rigid hierarchies. The authors are grappling with ideas like the relationship between property ownership and coercive power in ways that might make someone who leans right somewhat uncomfortable. It’s well researched and the conclusions aren’t too far ahead of the evidence, but the questions it is asking are questions that are rooted in pretty radical political theory.
ETA: he also accuses Pinker of making shit up as he goes, which is not a little thing, and imo delightful.
Sure, the domestication of dogs, which were probably the first domesticated animals, predates agriculture, but dogs weren’t domesticated as livestock animals. Horses were domesticated, not as a food source, but to exploit their usefulness, i.e. work.
In the Americas, turkeys, Muskovy ducks, guinea pigs, llamas, and alpacas were domesticated. The urban centers of southern North America, Central America and western South America had long depended on domesticated sources of animal foods instead of hunting.
From that above cite about dogs for food (my emphasis):
Throughout the Preclassic period in the Yucatán region, dogs were not the primary meat supply, but archaeological evidence indicates they were a substantial part of the Maya diet. In fact, at the Colha site, white-tailed deer accounted for up to fifty percent of the Maya meat source.
They were a food source long before they were used for anything else. Their usefulness for anything but riding was limited until the horse collar was developed, which was after cattle had been used as beasts of burden for many centuries. You can’t use a yoke on horses, nor can they pull against a strap on their chests, because of their anatomy. So that came later. The stirrup transformed war, as well.
The point is that domestication of animals was a separate development from agriculture; it existed in nomadic herders who did not grow plants, and farming developed in areas that never domesticated anything but the dog.
I’d push this good point further and say that the point is that it’s pretty much impossible to generalize about the domestication of pants or animals and the impact on hunting, because it varied so widely from place to place, and because it was far from uni-directional. We used to think there was a rachet: every step on the path to settled agriculturalist was taken on a certain order, and was immutable. But over the last generation it’s become increasingly clear that there’s no standard order or rachet:groups would adopt some aspect if the package for centuries but not “progress”, they would go “backwards”, and the political systems they created to manage their affairs provide no beautiful perfect correlations with their economic structures.
Heck, Europeans who had domestic livestock for centuries traveled to North America, and found abundant game. Despite having livestock, they also hunted extensively for food.
Another problem with is idea that farming leads to domesticated animals leads to no hinting issue is that marine-centered economies, based on fish and shellfish, are incredibly common across the span of the last 20k years. Is fishing “hunting”? Fish, even farmed fish, aren’t domesticated. Again, human development can’t be summarized as a series of binary choices.
Even riding came later. Egyptian chariots were popular because horses were a bit small to ride as cavalry but could pull a light vehicle just fine. After they’d been bred larger – on the steppes IIRC – direct riding was possible, although the stirrup had to be invented before that really took off.
The horse collar, as you said, had to be developed before the really heavy work could be done by them, pulling plows, coaches, and the like/
He concludes that the horse collar was only one of several developments that made horses more useful for agriculture. It took centuries after the invention of the horse collar for horses to become more widely used to pull loads. There was no sudden revolution.
The horse collar was important, but it was the result of long period of development of different types of harness, some of them nearly as effective.
Oxen were far cheaper to maintain – four times cheaper according to a 13th century book on husbandry.
The development of larger breeds of horses, horses becoming less expensive, development of an agricultural structure to supply the specialized feeding that horses required, were all necessary. The inventions of the the horseshoe, the whippletree, efficient harnessing of several horses in file also made a difference.
Thus, I conclude that the horse collar, rather than being a revolutionary invention was in fact an evolutionary change that was part of the development of the horse as an agricultural animal.
Canis lupus familiaris came to be in the Old World some time before the migration of Homo Sapiens Sapiens to the Americas, and was represented in the Americas by a monophyletic lineage that is now extinct save for genealogical remnants in modern dog varieties, e.g. Xoloitxcuintle, Chihuahua. The consumption of dog meat, in regard to the domestication of the Pleistocene Wolf that would become Canis lupus familiaris was practiced some time after the fact, however. There is an assertion, based on genetic studies that have been interpreted to indicate that the domestication of wolves originated in southeastern Asia, that this occurred for the production of dog meat, but that is speculative.
The passage you quote is muddled in that it conflates the consumption of dog meat with the consumption of white-tailed deer.
Absolutely,horses as a source of food long predated their domestication, but their domestication indicates other purposes.
Utilization for the purposes of being ridden is categorizable as work.
Your assertion is duly noted. There is a point, however, that holds that the domestication of livestock animals, which is specifically what I am referring to, was a concatenated development with agriculture. Nomads were not the only herding peoples, and the herding of goats developed around the same times as that of agriculture.
I’ll have to read him, then.