Oh jeez, no I didn’t actually look at the link. :smack:
I simply assumed that when brazil84 was talking about “domesticated wolves” he actually meant wolves that had been domesticated in our lifetime, not wolves that had been domesticated 10,000 years ago. :rolleyes:
And the moose! (almost.) Okay, best cite I could google up that wasn’t a photoshopped picture; probably hampered by the fact that a moose in America isn’t a moose in Europe…
Anyway, had Sweden thought of moose-cavalry in a pre-artillery era, we might have riding moose today. Likewise, I suspect that someone might have started domesticating zebra if there had been a more urgent need for tsetse-fly resistant mounts in colonizing subsaharan Africa.
But I’m skeptical on the need to take 10,000 years to domesticate the Cape hunting dog. Following the link to the domesticated fox study from the story I’d linked to, above, it only took 25 years for them to (accidentally, apparently) get many of the marks of domestication. Other links from there on feral dogs – such as the New Guinea singing dog – seem to suggest that canids might be very suited to domestication, because breeding for nonagression also seems to yield more adaptable socialization and those puppy-like characteristics we’ve bred into pet dogs over the milennia.
I’m not aware of any wolves that were domesticated in “our lifetime” i.e. the last 50 to 100 years.
Anyway, a domesticated wolf is commonly referred to as a “dog.” I didn’t use the word “dog” because I wanted to emphasize the fact that wolves and dogs are the same species.
Again, it strikes me as silly to say that zebras can’t be domesticated because they are aggressive towards humans. One could just as easily say the same thing about wolves. And yet we know that wolves can be domesticated.
I don’t think such an assumption is required. The fact is that it’s very difficult to know for sure how aggressive proto-horses were. However, it seems to me that at a minimum, we know that aggressive animals can be domesticated.
Further, if Diamond had said that there is reason to believe that proto-horses were more gentle than zebras because of some reason X, I might have some respect for his argument. Instead, he apparently either dodges the issue by comparing zebras to modern horses or reasons in circular fashion by claiming that the fact of domestication itself shows that horses are domesticable and zebras are not.
Basically what Lemur said. Common sense says that to start down the path you need (1) to have someone think of it; and (2) a cultural setting where there will be relatively immediate benefit to starting down the path. If those factors didn’t come together until after the horse was domesticated, then why would anyone bother?
A friend’s idol is John Connell who rode a moose. Here are a team of moose harnessed to a cart, and a moose hauling a travois.
Too cool.
A moose bit my sister…
I don’t think it works that way either. I think that humans will, do and have always tried to domesticate every single animal they can. First, because it is much easier to use a domesticated animal as a food source than hunting a wild animal. Then once an animal is domesticated, other uses for the animal are found, such as clothing (skins and wool), transportion and muscle power.
I think the mental conversation would be something like “Man, I really like horse meat. I wonder if I can get the horses to hang around so I can always have it available”, then "Wow, that worked, let’s try it on Zebras… dead ".
Even more likely is that someone domesticated small animals, so they proceeded to attempt to domesticate large animals.
Horses have been domesticated far longer than there have been chariots, and in areas where chariots were completely unusable, thus chariots are not the reason that horses were domesticated. In addition, horses, donkeys and oxen have been used for very similar purposes - transportation and muscle power - in the same areas at the same time for thousands of years. (Also, it looks like it probably wasn’t the onager that was pulling those chariots, but domesticated or wild african asses (per wikipedia). )
Why do you think this? Why would people not attempt to domesticate zebras?
Cite?
I agree that they were probably used for food first. I disagree that the only other use or even the next use was military. Horses were a great advantage in hunting. Just look at how the American Indian used them. Horses were also used as transportion - very useful for nomadic tribes because it allowed them to have more possessions and more stored food while still moving around. They were also probably used as muscle power in more settled areas, useful for pulling plows (and probably for other uses).
Again you are focusing on the military advantages of horses, when that has only been one aspect of their use. Still, other animals may not compare favorably to the horse if you can get a horse, but consider this. You are a tribe that does not have horses, wild or domestic, but you run into a tribe that does, maybe while out on a hunt. If you don’t get decimated, and you don’t manage to steal one of their horses, aren’t you going to try to domesticate every single animal that might be remotely usable in the same way?
I think we disagree on these assumptions:
You think that once an animal is bred to a certain purpose, there will not be any more effort to breed another animal for that purpose. I think that people will try to domesticate and breed every damn animal they can lay their hands on, and the only reason why a certain animal does not become domesticated is because there is an inherent problem with the animal.
You think that animals are bred to specific purposes. I think that animals are domesticated, and then people take advantage of any usable trait.
Well, I disagree with the notion that humans try to domesticate every species, and our current suite of domestic species are the only ones where it worked.
I don’t think farmers spend a lot of time capturing wild animals and trying to raise them in captivity. Now, it’s true that farmers probably hunted a lot more than people imagine, and the line between a hunter with a small plot of corn, beans and squash, and a farmer who takes a break from hoeing every chance he gets to hunt is pretty thin. But those hunters aren’t capturing animals and raising them for food, if they come across a baby horse they don’t raise it, they butcher it.
It seems to me that attempts at domestication are very rare, because nobody does it for fun. And there’s got to be room for domesticated animals in your society, a tradition of animal husbandry, before the notion of taming wild animals becomes sensible. But the trouble then is that if you’ve got a tradition of animal husbandry, you’ve already got a suite of domestic animals, and the likelyhood that a captured wild animal will be superior to your existing stock of domestic animals is near zero, and even if it would be better you’d never know it because you’re not going to waste your time and effort doing the experiment, you’re too busy scratching out a living.
So take for instance, the rabbit. Rabbits were domesticated in medieval Europe. Are we really to believe that something changed around 1000 AD that suddenly made rabbits more tame? The Romans could have tamed the rabbit, the Greeks could have, the Sumerians could have, the Chinese could have, the Aztecs could have, except they didn’t. Why not? We know, because we know Europeans domesticated the rabbit fairly easily, that rabbits aren’t difficult to domesticate. So why didn’t it happen earlier, or in the Americas, where there was a particular paucity of domestic animals…dogs, turkeys, guinea pigs, and llamas/alpacas are pretty much the list. So why not domesticate the rabbit? Are we supposed to believe that out of all the fifty odd species of Lagomorphs, *Oryctolagus cuniculus * is the only one suited for domestication? And even if that were true, why didn’t the European rabbit become domesticated in ancient times?
I, too, do not accept the hypothesis that humans attempt to domesticate every single animal that they can – because we have many historical examples of humans not domesticating animals that they had a need for.
Until the arrival of horses in the Americas, natives had only the llama as a transport animal – something that many other American civilizations had need of, and instead relied on human or dog travois, etc.
However, there were available animals to domesticate for transport – see moose, above. Also various elk and deer species found nearly everywhere on both continents. None were domesticated.
Instead, the Americas got, what? Llama, some dogs, turkeys… anything else? Guinea pigs as food? (checks - yep) Obviously, the many cultures of the Americas had not attempted to domesticate every animal that they could.
Furthermore, in the instance of the Mesoamericans domesticating dogs – those dogs weren’t being exploited to their full potential (e.g., in herding domesticated deer, for example), but were used as food. Frankly, the chihuahua is a really bad end result of a domesticated food species. They’d’ve been far better off domesticating something like the turkey, in terms of effort put in for meat yielded.
That’s one argument where Diamond is compelling: again and again through history, where humans could simply adopt something domesticated elsewhere (whether it be animals or plants), they did so, instead of going through the effort of domesticating a native species. He has a few examples of an animal or plant species being domesticated multiple times, but by and large he traces their domestication back to one region/culture (which then spread).
Really, the answer seems to be that we do not have riding zebras, not because it couldn’t be done, but because no one had the need to do it. I’m not up on the cultures that developed in zebra-country, but I suspect their lifestyles would not have benefited from zebra-chariots, zebra-carts, riding-zebras, zebradrawn-plows, or other zebra-related innovations.
edit: gah, ninja’d on the guinea pig while checking my guinea pig facts!
Well, they’re in cahoots with those biting, undomesticatable zebra, you see…
See, I don’t agree with this. Those sub-saharan african kingdoms really could have used zebras as domestic animals, except they just never tried to domesticate them. And when they saw examples of horses being used to good effect by outsiders, they didn’t imagine domesticating their native similar species, instead they figured they needed to get some of those horses for themselves.
Or take, I don’t know, ostriches. Ostrich ranching is (or was) all the rage. Ostrich ranching isn’t impossible, so why didn’t sub-saharan africans practice ostrich ranching? Sure, ostriches are dangerous, but are they more dangerous than a bull or a ram?
Now, about those moose. (Alces alces, what we call moose in American english is usually called “elk” over in Europe, while what we call “elk” (Cevus elephas/canadensis) is called “red deer” over there. So while those Swedes never domesticated moose, Rangifer tarundus was domesticated in northern Eurasia. Except in the Americas, the exact same species is present except it was never domesticated.
If we believe that just about every animal that could be domesticated WAS domesticated, why is it that caribou were domesticated in Eurasia but not America?
And my answer is that reindeer were probably domesticated in Eurasia only after a long history of pastoralism. And then on the northern limits of goat and sheep and cow and horse animal husbandry, herders started with reindeer. And the difference is that reindeer really can fill a function completely different than a cow or a sheep or a goat, because they can thrive in regions that are too cold for the standard eurasian suite of domestic animals. But without that pre-existing herding culture, the idea to attempt to domesticate reindeer never would have happened. And the domestication project was only successful because reindeer herding was possible in places where other herding was impossible, the reindeer wasn’t just a half-assed sheep or goat, it was something else entirely.
But in the Americas there was no such tradition of pastoralism. And so no Innuit hunter is going to get the idea to give up herding sheep and take up herding caribou, because he had no sheep in the first place. And it wasn’t until the 19th century that the attempt was made to introduce eurasian style reindeer herding to Alaska. Unless your society is already a herding society, the likelihood that you will incorporate new domestic animals to herd is pretty much zero. Except not exactly zero, because we have those sheep, goats, cows, pigs, horses, and chickens to account for.
So my theory is that a domestic animal requires a niche in human society to exist. And existing domestic animals fill most existing niches, so any potential new animal must fill a niche that isn’t filled by any other domestic animal. And not all human societies have the same niches available. Hunter-gatherers only have dogs. Herders and farmers have plenty of space for domestic animals, but those spaces are already filled. And modern society has unlimited space for just about any crazy domestication program, because we can do it for fun, or as a multilevel marketing scam, or so on.
It’s just a wikipedia cite, but I find it interesting:
Since I have quietly and dutifully read every word of this very involved thread, and have had tons of ignorance fought, I think I have the right to admit that for some reason, that cracked me up so bad! Ha!
While I’ve admitted to not knowing enough about subsaharan African cultures to make a better argument for why they didn’t domesticate zebras, this part makes me scratch my head.
Specifically, the “herders and farmers [with] plenty of space of domestic animals”. Because the Mesoamerican cultures were herders and farmers (well, farmers, mostly), and they did really have plenty of space for domesticated animals.
They even had some not-so-poor choices to try to domesticate – deer, rabbits, both of which they hunted, and so were familiar with. But they got by with (AFAIK) mainly turkeys and dogs as domesticated food critters. So we’re left, again, with the question: why didn’t they start raising deer herds, or domesticate the rabbit like Europeans did?
Most deer aren’t herd animals, and have little or no social behaviour. This in contrast to cattle, horses, sheep, and goats (and dogs). That’s not to say that social behaviour is necessary for domestication (see: cats), but it’s surely got to make it a lot easier. And once you have domestic sheep and goats, what’s the attraction of deer?
I think we can more rationally make the assumption that there are animals that cannot be domesticated because of aggressiveness, than to say that just because an animal is aggressive is no reason to think it can’t be domesticated…
This isn’t exactly Diamond’s argument. I have pulled out part of a segment of his book to back my assertions, but that doesn’t mean that is what he is arguing. If you are interested, you might consider reading his book, or at least this chapter (which number I will get later if you want it).
I have more to add, but I got caught up in a work issue and it is way past time for me to leave.
I don’t see why one would make that assumption. Earlier in this thread, somebody offered the rule that an animal cannot be domesticated if it is too aggressive. I offered the counter-example of wolves. I don’t think my counter-example has been rebutted.
I read the book many years ago. I don’t recall it in detail, but at the time I was not very impressed. Anyway, I’m more interested in discussing the issues on the message board. If you don’t wish to defend Diamond, that of course is your choice.
The man who wrote this post has been sacked.
Because your counter-example does not prove your argument. One animal that is aggressive that has been domesticated does not prove that it there is no animal too aggressive to be domesticated. I would say that your argument is very close to stating that duck quacks don’t echo, because you’ve seen a duck quack and didn’t hear an echo.
Note that wolves and dogs are more closely related than horses and zebras: Wolves and dogs share the same species, canis lupus, whereas zebras and horses are related at the genus level equus, with horses being E. caballus and zebras being in three different species: E. grevyi, E. quagga, E. zebra, and E. hartmannae.
I’m not sure if this is a whoosh or not.
Perhaps, but who has the burden of proof here? Diamond is claiming that the zebra is too aggressive to be domesticated. We know that at a minimum, some subset of animals can be radically transformed through domestication. We also know that, at a minimum, some subset of aggressive animals can be domesticated.
It seems to me that the burden of proof is firmly on Diamond and his supporters to come forth with evidence showing that zebras and the like are particularly non-domesticable.
Not really. A better analogy would be if you were to claim that duck quacks don’t echo, and I pointed out that I saw a duck quack and did hear an echo. Yes, that doesn’t prove that duck quacks echo, but it casts doubt on your assertion.
Of course, and I’ve never claimed otherwise. In fact, I referred to dogs as “domesticated wolves” in order to emphasize that they are the same species.