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  1. Other Human species becoming dominant

    Well, I suppose it's possible. I'm a skeptic, but a timeline to this effect would certainly be interesting. I think the realist in me finds it more plausible for them to remain Stone Age tribes until they are discovered by the outside world. I think the idea of the hobbits has rather more...

  2. Other Human species becoming dominant

    If this were the case, I would expect OTL's Aboriginal Australians to be exceptionally intelligent, on average. Maybe that's the case, but I suspect that they average about the same as other groups of people. I want to be clear that I don't have any problems with Homo floresiensis reaching...

  3. Other Human species becoming dominant

    Everybody loves an underdog, but the reality is that underdogs usually lose. It certainly would be great fun to make a massive "hobbit" civilization, but, in all seriousness, it's hideously implausible. Do we know for certain that Flores "hobbits" were doomed to fall before Homo...

  4. Komodo Dragons

    I think the general view nowadays is that all the monitor lizards belong to one genus, Varanus. So, "megalania" is no longer a valid genus, but just a common name. Also, my understanding is that Komodo dragons don't actually hunt in packs, but all kind of congregate around a kill. ----- My...

  5. Guns, Germs and Steel

    The Anna Karenina Principle In Jared Diamond's book, he uses what he calls the "Anna Karenina principle," which based on something Anna allegedly said: "All happy marriages are the same; unhappy marriages are all unhappy for different reasons." In the case of domestic animals, it's "All...

  6. Guns, Germs and Steel

    I think we can all agree that elephants aren't domesticated in the strictest sense. I don't think that's true at all: if I had to guess, I would say elephants are just as likely to attack as moose or bison. But, I have no statistics that definitively support either side. The real pivotal...

  7. Guns, Germs and Steel

    Interesting. Now, the question is whether there is evidence of this. The effects of this selection should be visible today. What sort of difference in birth rate should we expect between African animals and Eurasian animals under similar human hunting pressures? Would you expect shorter...

  8. Guns, Germs and Steel

    I've thought about that possibility too, and I think it's an extremely good point. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are a range of migratory patterns: some ungulates migrate long distances, some migrate short distances, and some don't seem to truly migrate at all. This means that, at any season, a...

  9. Guns, Germs and Steel

    You may very well be right, and I have no way of demonstrating that you are not. But, this is just an ad hoc rationalization. On this thread, I've been trying to find out how violent an animal must be before it cannot be domesticated, and I don't have a satisfactory answer yet...

  10. Guns, Germs and Steel

    I found somebody named Tajana Vukičević, who apparently studied red deer and the Vučedol culture, but most of the stuff is translated from Croatian, so I can't understand it. Let me know when you find it, because I am definitely interested in seeing the results.

  11. Guns, Germs and Steel

    Okay, that's true: I overstated my argument a bit there. Agriculture is certainly another major advancement that might have facilitated animal domestication. The dates are a little dodgy, though, so it's hard to tell whether plants or animals were domesticated first. I happen to think the...

  12. Guns, Germs and Steel

    I've never really bought in to this idea. The trouble is that all the evidence for it is gone: the allegedly human-naive fauna of Eurasia were all either hunted to extinction or domesticated, so we can't observe their naivete directly. Of course, Neanderthals and Denisova hominids and...

  13. Guns, Germs and Steel

    Zebras, too Here's another long essay I wrote, this time about domesticating zebras. I hope at least some people are interested enough to read it. Another popular animal among alternate-history fans is the zebra. Diamond has convinced a lot of people that the zebra is unsuitable for...

  14. Guns, Germs and Steel

    I don't doubt it. But, these are all animals that are the product of many generations of artificial selection for exactly those attributes of temperament, so I'm not sure how useful the observation is. Also, early phases of horse domestication are known to have involved corrals, so it's also...

  15. Guns, Germs and Steel

    In the specific case of the African buffalo, I don't know if the animal could plausibly have been domesticated, so I can only guess about the factors involved. But, as far as sub-Saharan Africans not domesticating any animals, that probably is explainable entirely by environmental factors...

  16. Guns, Germs and Steel

    Guns, Germs and Steel (a criticism of "domesticability") This thread is largely for me (and others) to rant about alternative domestication, though I welcome discussion and feedback and other stuff. I have been wanting to post a thread on this topic for some time, but never got around to it...

  17. What held the Natives back?

    No, that is not what I said. What I said was that time is not the only factor, a point you seem to agree with. So, I'm not sure why you're getting snarky about it. Let's examine the claim for a minute. Your exact words were:

  18. What held the Natives back?

    This comparison, of course, breaks down when you throw sub-Saharan Africa into the mix. Obviously, humans were there longer than they were anywhere else, and technological development there did not progress on anything like the same curve as in Europe and Asia. So, what made X more advanced...

  19. Pecari rex, Equus regina: American Domesticates 3.0

    I guess it's technically possible, but I'm a skeptic, personally. Cultural beliefs don't seem like very good motivation for animal domestication, in my mind: I think you'd need the animal to fill an important niche (food, clothing, transportation, etc) and demonstrate a real, lasting benefit...

  20. Pecari rex, Equus regina: American Domesticates 3.0

    You're doing a terrific job with this timeline, and I've been following along silently. I do want to point out one thing here. I worked on a prairie dog project as a summer job several years ago, and I was pretty well-read on all the data about prairie dogs. The thing about livestock breaking...
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