I, too, am a fan of Diamond’s book and will add my recommendation . Though I do remember disagreeing with it here and there.
Re: Taming vs. Domesticating animals - Another case is the Cheetah, that tames remarkably quickly and can be quite dog-like in its behavior. The Mughal Padishahs used to keep hundreds for coursing game. Unfortunately it won’t breed in captivity worth a damn, despite the best efforts of many, making it unsuitable for domestication. One result - Cheetahs are now extinct in Northern India despite having been a favorite play thing of the monarchs there.
Whack-a-Mole: I’m gonna go along with bdgr on this one. Certain strains of cattle are not at all like your average brain-dead dairy cow. They’re tough, fit, ornery, and well-adapted to rugged climes. Not too far from your stereotypical Cape Water Buffalo, really - And nobody messes with those.
DDG, Collounsbury: I believe wheels have been found on what appear to be Incan toys.
sjc: Re: Domestic dogs retaining juvenile features - Yep. The process is called neoteny and can be seen both behaviorally and physically. An adult Labrador Retriever looks pretty much identical to a puppy. Whereas a wolf puupy looks very similar to a Lab puppy, but an adult wolf looks quite different indeed. This carries over into behavior, as apparenty the retrieval instinct is common to a particular stage of development in all puppies. In the neotenic retrievers, this behavioral trait has been preserved in a sexually mature adult. Ad that’s just one of a hundreds of examples ( many of which are more complex and less clear-cut ). There was a very nice article in Smithsonian Magazine some years ago ( decades? ) in relation to sheep dogs.
It’s just a WAG, but I think you’re not giving enough credit to the hardy souls who domesticated horses. Of course, nobody knows for sure, but I would guess that the original horses were not that much easier to approach and domesticate than zebras.
Also, any list of domesticated animals should include humans, for better or worse.
Eh? Perhaps we’re working from different definitions here, but I think that “cattle-herders” indicates pastoralism, which is rather different from a HFG economy.
The !San (Bushmen) are hunter-gatherers to this very day, but I believe that that’s attributed to pressure from pastoralists since about 500 BCE.
slight hijack here. I seem to recall either a movie or a music video (possibly even a commercial) from some intermidable number of years ago which featured a character at some point (perhaps a dream sequence) riding a zebra bare back. I remember it stuck out in my head because I’d never seen anything like that before and it made me wonder why as they’d look pretty cool in a parade. I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t a horse painted to look like a zebra, but I did try to ascertain if it was one, and it didn’t look like a paint job.
There’s been a few people raise them, particularly for cross-breeding with horses or donkeys, but it’s hardly a major industry, and I’d tend to agree that it just isn’t practical:
Oh bloody hell, I misrecalled your statement while I was writing the reply. My apologies.
True, true.
Precisely, and contra AWC’s WAG, genetic evidence suggests multiple domestication events from seperate equine pools, strongly suggesting that the equine rootstock was in fact quite approachable and thus shouldn’t be assumed ipso fact to be equivalent of Zebra.
(See Vila et al “Widespread Origins of Domestic Horse Lineages” 291 Science (5503) 474 )
In the context of present knowledge, given folks who had knowledge of domestication, interbred two different cattle breeds (Indian and NEAfrica/Middle Eastern) to produce a hybrid --suggesting they were not innocent of a certain animal husbandry-- non-domestication of Zebras should be considered to have been too much of a pain in the ass (and remain so today even given greater resources).
Tuckerfan, you may be thinking of the forgettable 1984 movie Sheena starring former Charlie’s Angel Tanya Roberts. According to the ‘goofs’ page at the IMDb, the zebra she’s riding is actually a horse.
I just found my citations in re the cattle issue:
C. Troy, D. Machugh, et al. “Genetic evidence for Near-Eastern origins of European cattle” Nature 410, 1088 - 1091 (2001)
Daniel G. Bradley, David E. MacHugh, et al.
“Mitochondrial diversity and the origins of African and European cattle” PNAS 1996 93: 5131-5135.
I just found my citations in re the cattle issue:
C. Troy, D. Machugh, et al. “Genetic evidence for Near-Eastern origins of European cattle” Nature 410, 1088 - 1091 (2001)
Daniel G. Bradley, David E. MacHugh, et al.
“Mitochondrial diversity and the origins of African and European cattle” PNAS 1996 93: 5131-5135.
I noticed in DDG’s most excellent link, that Quagga seemed
to be quite easy to domesticate and took to it swimmingly,
but are now extinct. (Last female died in 1892 or something.)
(hijack!)
So it sounds like this would be a good species to
ressurect… Does anyone know of any Quagga preserved
in a museum or something? And is genetic engineering
up to the task of bringing these guys back yet? I
mean, I get the impression from some stuff I’ve read
lately that we can take genes from one species,
and insert them into the egg of another closely related
species, and the surrogate mother (probably a plains
zebra or something) would give birth easily enough.
-Ben
I wonder if anyone’s ever tried domesticating otters? Ursula LeGuin mentioned that in passing in one of her novels, and they do seem like friendly, likable little guys. Of course, you’d need to own your own pool . . .
I seem to recall that a number of years ago (like early to mid-80’s) “Science Digest” had done a piece on this in relation to cloning (and the Quagga) and they’d found that the preserved cells in tanned hides could be inspired to start growing again. Admittedly, this doesn’t mean one could come up with a healthy clone of the animal, but it certainly betters the odds of us being able to do it.
With the boon of ‘strange’ pets, how long will it be before we consider hamsters, gerbils, mice, squirrels, weasels, raccoons, and so on as ‘domesticated’ animals? I realize the chances of domesticating these entire breeds are unlikely, however the longer we continue to expand, the more room we take from animals such as this, and at some point, domesticated animals may be all the animals left.
On another note, I hear that skunks are very friendly and likable, once their stink glands are removed and they become accustomed to their master. How long until the stink glands are bred out and the skunk is just another domestic with a smelly history?
2456: “Oh, PLEASE, Mom, skunks don’t smell! Where’d you get that stupid idea? :rolleyes:”
Here’s the thing. I don’t thing domesicating an animal is as obvious a step as one might think. Even if you have domestic cows, that doesn’t mean that you would automatically try to domesticate other animals…or that you would succeed if you tried.
I’m guessing that nobody in Africa ever thought that zebras would be particularly good riding animals, or that there was such a concept as “riding animal” until they saw horses. And by then horses had been domesticated for thousands of years. Meaning that if you wanted a riding animal it was ten times easier to get yourself a horse than to try to capture, tame, breed, and domesticate zebras.
I agree with Diamond’s concept that some animals would be easier to domesticate than others, but I also think that animal husbandry isn’t as obvious a step as it seems. Even if you have llamas, that doesn’t mean you’re going to try to domesticate deer. Deer are “domesticable”, people today raise them on farms. But nobody saw the benefit back then.
But once you have the benefit of domesticating a particular kind of animal pointed out by example, it will still remain easier to adopt the already domesticated version, rather than do it yourself. I think we need to remember that people can be very conservative. And also that there were probably many attempts at domestication that COULD have succeeded, but for whatever reason just didn’t.
Then so is Cecil Adams. He, too, attributes it to the lack of draft animals, the llama being mostly unsuitable to drawing wagons.
Just as the original Americans never thought to invent the wheel (except for Mexican toys or cult objects), all of you never thought to see what Unca Cecil had to say about it.
What I find really intriguing in Cecil’s column is the possibility that every wheel in existence today can be traced back to a single, nameless Sumerian inventor who lived around 3500 BC. Did you know the wheel was not seen in Britain until 500 BC?
. Though I do remember disagreeing with it here and there.