Didn't this experiment showed some side effects of domestication, as permanance of "youth" characters as well coloring of animals? It would be interesting to keep in mind when we're talking about domesticating bears.
Cool Potential Domestications
- Thread starter DG Valdron
- Start date
Didn't this experiment showed some side effects of domestication, as permanance of "youth" characters as well coloring of animals? It would be interesting to keep in mind when we're talking about domesticating bears.
Yes, it did, and that seems to be a fairly common feature in domestication.
I just imagine the head of the "domesticated bears" promoters.
"What the...We wanted a bear cavalry, and we have PedoBear!"
Retention of juvenile physical and personality traits is common in domesticates. The general rule is that domesticates seem to be smaller than the wild breeds.
It's not a hard and fast rule though. Some breeds of horse and dog are utter monsters compared to their wild forefathers.
Titus_Pullo
Banned
A sabertooth is more likely to eat you than let you ride its back. Maybe on the Planet Eternea this is possible, but not on earth. I understand this question was posted just for fun, but given the nature of the very question it really belongs in the ASB section.
Says you, but I'll take the word of Diamond any day than the word of most people in a science fiction discuission board. Not being smug, just saying.
Uhh, animal sanctuaries are full of abandoned and donated cheetas, lions tigers, panthers and just about any type of large feline you can think of, left there by people who thought they could be domesticated and turned into docile cuddly cute little furballs like your cat Fluffy. There is a good reason why Humans never bothered to selectively breed cheetas because huge carnivores are by their very ingrained nature non domesticable. Like I said before there is a difference between taming and domesticating. Many people seem to think that taming and domesticating are the same. That's not the case. Taming process a wild animal (let's say a cheetah) is subdued into adapting and submitting to human control. But their wildness is still there and can be triggered off by undue stress. There have been many instances of trainers being killed or injured by circus animals, particularly elephants. People who like to keep large felines like lions and tigers have been mauled to death by them. In other words their unpredictability makes them very dangerous and so not very attractive candidates for domestication.
Granted cheetahs tend to be less agressive than other large felines and easier to tame than any other large cats. You can't completely domesticate it.
In the domestication process, Humans modify certain species of animals by maintaining them in or near human habitation and by breeding from those certain animals who seem best suited for various human objectives.
Not just economically costly but human self presevation and the animal's own instinct makes it impossible. You are as much likely to end up on its menu.
You mean dogs? Do
Tens of thousands of years of evolution in Africa made the African elephant less suitable for domestication. Simply put they're more agressive than Asian elephants considering its had more predators in Africa and longer human contact sho hunted them. While Asian elephants have had little predator and human interaction in that same time frame. this means that African elephants are more agressive. By this very same logic, it was likely Hannibal went to battle with Indian elephants, because they're easier to train and more docile. Another likely possibility were a smaller species of Atlas elephants only 8 feet tall as opposed to 11 foot tall sub-saharan elephants. But in the end it doesn't matter because you can only tame an elephant, not domesticate it. All this talk about the domestication of large herbivores (nevermind large carnivores) completely misses the point that large african herbivores are much too agressive to control. Consider the fact that humans have ony lived outside of Africa for 50,000 years and before humans ever settled Asia, Europe and the Americas, animals there evolved without human contact. Which made them easier to kill, easier to tame, easier to domesticate. Not so for large African mammals, like African elephants, rhinos, hippos. Sure its fun to imagine a rhino heavy cavalry charging out of the bush against the grenadier guards, but that's in the realm of fantasy.
Look you can state all sorts of reasons but you can't deny the fact that hippos are not suitable for domestication. Their sheer size, powerful jaws combined with their extremely territorial nature made it impossible for Africans to domesticate them. More than any other mammals except for the lion, Hippos kill more humans in Africa every year.
The same route Macedonians used to aqcuire theirs. Down the Nile Valley into Egypt, or by the Red Sea, and then bred in captivity. Why not? The Ptolemies were using Indian elephants. Which were brought by the Macedonians from India to Egypt where they were bred specifically for use as war elephants. And their descendants were used by the Carthaginians. Hannibal likely used a mix of Atlas and Asian elephants, sub-Saharan elephants, not likely.
Last edited:
African elephants -- of the 'forest' stock, which is now widely agreed by zoologists to be a different species from the better-known (and usually larger) 'savanna' stock -- were tamed successfully in the Congo at some stage during the 20th century, and proved capable of being used for the same kinds of work (in, for example, forestry) as Asian ones have been. Possible then => plausibly posible earlier.
Maybe so, maybe not, but in any case the lengthy life-cycle means that trying to domesticate them -- instead of just capturing new ones from the wild -- would have been prohbitively expensive.
The Ptolemies' Indian elephants were captured from the Seleucids, who obtained a quantity of them (I seem to recall the figure '500' being quoted...) from an Indian ruler (Chandragupta, I think) in exchange for the Indian provinces that they'd "inherited" from Alexander... and neither the Seleucids nor the Ptolemies is credited with having managed to maintain those stocks' numbers through captive breeding.
twovultures
Donor
You shouldn't take Diamond at his word. He's synthesized a lot of research, and he did a very good job with his book, but there's a lot of papers just a Google search away that contradict his domestication dates and views on how geology shapes politics, among other things. You should do your own research to confirm what you believe he says. Failing that, you should at least consider what other people on this board say, as they are generally speaking nerds who do a ton of their own research for fun.
I doubt this, mainly because cheetahs are so rare even compared to other big cats.
Source? I don't think Diamond ever claims that all predators are inherently non domesticable, just that they're very inefficient to feed and so generally not worth domesticating (canines are partially omnivorous, making feeding them easier than an obligate carnivore). He does say that raising a Grizzly Bear to adulthood is suicidal, but grizzlies are not all predators.
And anyway, cheetahs are not huge carnivores. They are greyhound-shaped big cats, and like the greyhound their delicate bone structure makes them fast but not very strong. Other predators regularly bully them away from their kills. Cheetahs do not pose a great danger to humans, so this cannot be the reason why they were never domesticated.
This is true, and evident on this thread.
The aurochs. And for that matter, the pig and the horse. Hell, dogs came from wolves, which have haunted European myths for centuries as dangerous creatures. Being dangerous does not make an animal undomesticable, it just makes it harder to domesticate. Size and aggressiveness are not the final determinants of what gets domesticated, other factors like hierarchical social structure, need to migrate, and speed of reproduction are more important. It's why cows are domesticated but the smaller and less dangerous deer is not.
I don't think prehistoric Asia had any less predators than prehistoric Africa.
While anatomically modern humans left Africa only 50,000 years ago, Homo erectus and other hominids have been hunting animals in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. It was not human contact that made the difference in animal domesticability. If this was true, why did the Americas have so much fewer domesticable animals than Eurasia?
The hippo is extremely dangerous, but once again so is the aurochs. The difference between the two is that hippos are not a social species (aside from resting close to each-other in rivers) while the aurochs lived in mixed-sex herds led by dominant males. In captivity, this dominance could be transferred to humans, which made the dangerous aurochs domesticable. It's social structure, not danger, that makes an animal not domesticable. Dangerous animals could be realistically domesticated if they have the correct behavior.
That's pretty much the biggest flaw in Diamond's "everything that can be domesticated has been domesticated!" line of though. Some animals that weren't domesticated IOTL were just because there was a slightly better candidate in the same place that made pointless to tame both at the same time. So if that one better candidate didn't exist it could be expected to see the second best candidate filling its role. Consider jackals and foxes instead of wolves, or the european bison instead of the aurochs, or onagers instead of horses and donkeys. Hell, it could even be argued that had the horse not gone extinct in the Middle East at the end of the Pleistocene, donkeys would have never been domesticated and we would sit here today arguing that donkeys are by their very nature as undomesticable as zebras.
A number of the likelier candidates -- mainly camelids and horses -- died out around the time when humans arrived there: Some palaeontolgists suggest that that was extinction through over-hunting, which was possible because those species didn't have the African/Eurasian fauna's experience of coping with human/hominid predation...
Titus_Pullo
Banned
Your own personal doubts versus actual facts?
Theyre omnivores. they'll eat what's available, including you given the chance.
So what exactly is your point? that cheetas can be domesticated like a lap dog because other animals bully them in the Svannah?
Not as much as Africa.
Simple answer, extinction brought on by climate change. The end of the Pleistocene coincided with a global cooling event and the extinction of many large mammals. Evidence suggests North America was hardest hit by extinctions, and it was during this period that domesticable mammals like the horse dissapeared in North America, but not before they could cross the Berring land bridge where the horses survived in Asia and Europe.
It depends. Zebras are as social as horses are but are not domesticable. Zebras tend to be more flighty and have a mean streak. American bison are herd animals and as such similar to cattle, yet undomesticable also very dangerous. African cape buffaloes are herd animals, but undomesticable.
Compared to Asian water buffaloes which happen to be domesticated. Ignoring the dangerous temperement of an animal in the domestication potential ignores the fact that large herbivores that have never been domesticated also belong in the "Big Five widowmakers" of Africa, Cape Buffalo, Rhino and African Elephant, the other two being carnivores.
twovultures
Donor
But if Titus_Pullo's claim that a lack of human predation=domesticability, then there should have been more easily domesticable animals among the species that did survive the end of the Pleistocene.
Aye about that latter bit. I've read guinea pigs are actually less neotenous than their wild relatives. Very interesting stuff.
I've been wondering how many more species in the Mustela genus could be domesticated. There's already the ferret, which is a domesticated European Polecat; that leaves open the related Steppe Polecat of Central Asia. Does anyone know anything about attempts to domesticate stoats?
Titus_Pullo
Banned
Think about this folks. Africa was colonized by Europeans since atleast the late 1500s. If it was even remotely possible to domesticate African herbivores and exploit them to the extent of cattle and horses they would have done it already.
that said, its not entirely impossible to tame and ride a zebra but taming a zebra is more difficult than taming a horse. Europeans have been trying to domesticate zebras since atleast the 19th century and have gotten only marginal success. I'm sure the attempts to domesticate a zebra goes further back to the early Dutch settlers in the 1600s. Aside from getting a zebra to accept a bridle and ride it, zebras are spooked more easily than horses, so a Zebra cavalry was out of the question. Europeans were persistant and they would have gone out of their way to domesticate an animal like the zebra which has certain advantages that horses don't possess, like resistance to African diseases. They would have been more ideal riding the African savannah, and interior, but they failed, and not for lack of trying.
that said, its not entirely impossible to tame and ride a zebra but taming a zebra is more difficult than taming a horse. Europeans have been trying to domesticate zebras since atleast the 19th century and have gotten only marginal success. I'm sure the attempts to domesticate a zebra goes further back to the early Dutch settlers in the 1600s. Aside from getting a zebra to accept a bridle and ride it, zebras are spooked more easily than horses, so a Zebra cavalry was out of the question. Europeans were persistant and they would have gone out of their way to domesticate an animal like the zebra which has certain advantages that horses don't possess, like resistance to African diseases. They would have been more ideal riding the African savannah, and interior, but they failed, and not for lack of trying.
Last edited:
Almost certainly not suitable for riding. Spine's not built for that kind of thing, and the ratio isn't right. You don't want a rider or pack more than 15 to 20% of the weight of the mount for most critters.
But you know, you're such an obvious expert on Sabertooth behaviour, I'll just defer to you on this.
Is that what has your panties in such a knot?
This is why you feel the need to come and bitch people out?
Anatomically modern humans were contemporaneous with a great deal of currently extinct pleistocene megafauna. And relatively sophisticated hominids overlapped with a lot of currently extinct pliocene megafauna.
So its not out of the bounds of possibility that some of the extinct and quite likely some of the current fauna may have had domestication possibilities, which, in some alternate history scenario might have been exploited by hypothetical cultures which saw opportunities and economic and social rewards.
That's what alternate history is all about.
Long as you don't have to give it any thought yourself, dude.
Me? I poked around. I gave it some thought. I'll disagree with Diamond, who has a gift for oversimplification and pulling together other peoples work into nifty packages.
That being the best index of domestication potential around?
Well, you can argue that the magical soul of a cheetah is untameable. But me, I'm a more practical sort. I would, for instance, point to the complete lack of genetic diversity in cheetahs resulting from a genetic bottleneck, which produces almost no opportunities for meaningful selective breeding - there's nothing to select from. And I would, for instance, recognize specific issues in the animal's behavioural range, specifically the cross country courtship issue. And finally, I would point out that there's a complete lack of economic justification to go through the effort of domesticating a cheetah, if you already have domesticates that fill the potential role.
You're having a discussion with someone else here. Or just holding forth. Good for you. Not engaging.
You do spot the catch 22 you got there?
Yes, I do mean dogs. I mean in the arctic environment an exclusively carnivorous draft animal so close to its wild forebears that the damned things still howl. And you do not get to pretend that dogs in the arctic or subarctic are omnivores, because there's just not enough accessible vegetation utilized by inuit culture for either humans or dogs to support omnivory.
I'd also point to a general lack of organized cultures which would have seen any need to enlist or tame them for labour. On that point, almost all the Early civilizations across AsiaAfrica made use of elephants as labour animals during their history. If there was no human niche to fit elephants into, there's obviously no opportunity.
Because Asia had no lions and tigers? Or is it because Indian Elephants were so much bigger and more robust than the African ones?
Homo Erectus seems to have been active across southern asia, throughout elephant habitat, starting about two million years ago. Denisovan humans are also found succeeding Homo Erectus. And anatomically modern humans are dated throughout India as far out as the Phillipines to at least 60,000 years ago.
Fed Ex, uh?
Because the ethereal soul of the elephant is undomesticatable. Well, that's your position, I guess. But I don't find your argument persuasive.
Well, if you've got a narrow definition of human. As I said, Homo Erectus was pretty widespread. The Denisovans diverged from Africa 800,000 years ago, and neandertals 600,000 years ago, so they were in Asia a good long time. Anatomically modern humans seem to have reached the Phillipines 67,000 years ago, so that probably puts them in the rest of asia between 70,000 and 80,000 years ago.
There are practical downsides to using a rhino as a beast of burden. They're not terribly good at it. They're good for sprinting charges. But they're mostly browsers, not grazers. And they carry too much weight - run a Rhino for more than ten minutes, and their heart will literally burst.
So, if you have a culture which can acquire pre-domesticated cattle, why bother going through the expense and time of domesticating Rhinos, which will only produce a less efficient animal in the long run. Economics guy. It comes down to cost effectiveness.
They're mean customers, granted. But on the other hand, humans first domesticate was an out and out carnivore.
True, hippos are huge. But the aurochs, the southeast asian water buffalo are huge animals, and several civilizations incorporated elephants into their societies and economies.
But I think that the real deal breaker is that the combination of factors that opened up the possibility of domestication simply were not there. There was no geographical or ecological interface which would motivate hippos to habituate to human presence. There was no human economy which could offer a useful niche for Hippo.
The Macedonians actually went all the way out to India. Remember Alexander?
Uh huh.
To make your thesis work - the Macedonians either had to bring back a breeding population of domesticated elephants - domesticated. Not bloody likely.
Or they had to bring back a population of tame and/or wild elephants, releasing the tame ones into the countryside to go feral and produce new generations of transplanted Indian elephants in Africa....
Or they just brought back an incredible shitload of incredibly long lived Indian elephants that just spent the next couple of centuries knocking around the Mediterranean.
Look, I'm enjoying this. But in terms of plausibility, you should just stick with Fed Ex.
Anyway, lissen up: No hard feelings okay? I mean, you came into this thread swinging, and swinging hard. So you gotta expect that some people are gonna swing back. Now, I'm obviously not taking this too seriously, but that doesn't invalidate the significance of our disagreement, or the fact that I think you're very wrong. But it is not aimed at you personally. At the end of the day, we're all pals.
The Sandman
Banned
...or the Europeans didn't want to bother with the time and expense of doing so when they already had viable domesticates?
I mean, the Europeans had a habit of trying to move their native crops in wherever they went instead of adopting locally-grown crops that were more suited to the terrain, and that was a situation where they'd only have to learn a few details about an organism already optimized for human use. Do you really think they'd put in the time required to modify any wild critters when they don't actually need to?
That's a bit of an overreach. Better to say that some parts, specifically South Africa, was colonized by European settlers starting around 1650.
That in the 1500's, various European trading posts and way stations were established along the coast.
More serious European colonization really only goes back to the 19th century and in most cases the later parts of the 19th century.
I'd argue that in fact, this was done in the case of the Gray Ostrich aka the Southern Ostrich, which was domesticated quite rapidly in the late 19th century in South Africa.
By that time, the available niches of draft animal had been thoroughly exploited by both domestic and imported cattle and horses, so there was very little development or opportunity there. Nevertheless, it found economic utility.
Why would you want to tame a horse? It's already a domesticate. There are almost no wild horses left in the world. All of what we consider wild horses are actually domesticated horses or the offspring of domesticated horses gone feral.
But never mind. I assume what you are saying is that taming a wild animal is more difficult than taming a domesticated animal, even if that animal has gone feral. Uhmm, okay.
I'm curious here. How long did it take to domesticate the horse? A week? Two weeks? A couple of years? One generation? Twenty? What's the legitimate time frame to achieve domestication?
For that matter, what was the time frame to domesticate Water Buffalo, Aurochs, Llamas and Yaks? Because really, that stuff is your comparison.
I would disagree. Most of the European effort in Africa in the 19th century was not long term, but rather short term and opportunistic. Objectives had to be achieved immediately or in the most rapid manner possible. Long term goals, generally not a priority.
Under those circumstances, there's not a lot of strong motivation for domesticating Zebra. Certainly its the province of hobbyists who are operating in small scale and unsophisticated ways.
But even there, the motivation is pretty diffuse. Which is preferable for the Europeans? Going through the time and expense of creating a domesticated version of a local wild animal, in order to take advantage of an immunity. Or finding simple and economically effective work-arounds.
Or hell, why not just try to find a way to breed in an immunity, or vaccinate an existing effective domesticate. I mean, look at it this way: When I have a flat tire, I don't buy a new car.
The Zebra precedent is interesting and fun, because Zebra's are very photogenic, being all horselike and stripey. But I think it's overplayed. Particularly when there's a successful counter example in the Southern Ostrich.
Well, take it a step further. Accepting lack of human predation contributes to domesticability, there should be huge domestication opportunities viable for all sorts of extinct fauna and megafauna.
This, but you also have to look at it in marketplace terms rather than straight expense.
A society could invest the time and effort to raising and maintaining a domesticated variety of elephant.
But there's no motivation to do so, when you can just capture and incorporate wild ones. Going that route, you avoid the expense of ten or twenty years of feeding the bastards.
So for a society to contemplate the investment of domesticating elephants, the wild population has to be in such short supply that the investment makes sense.
But the real nut, the tough nut to crack, is in competing domestics.
Cattle, Horses, Camel and Water Buffalo grow to maturity in only two or three years. Their gestation periods are much shorter. They breed much faster. They give better horsepower for fodder.
So, you get yourself a breeding pair of elephants and raise them from babies. Well, its about 15 or 20 years before they're going to do work. The working lifetime is maybe forty or fifty years. In that time frame you get maybe five or ten more elephants, only half of which have come on line as workers, if that.
Same time frame you start with a breeding pair of cattle. They're working within three years. They don't live so long, but they breed more and faster. At the end of the original elephants span, you've got a big herd of cattle.
As long as a culture has access to more economical domesticates, there's no reason to make the investment in elephant domestication.
Hypothetically, you could get elephant domestication in a culture which, for one reason or another, is bereft of alternatives.
Titus_Pullo
Banned
Some of them might. Who knows? But those that survived the pleistocene extinction to this day such as polar bears and bisons are not.
That's what alternate history is all about.
Poked around where? The local comic book shop? Seriously can you name a single published scholarly work that that denies the fact that tens of thousands of years of evolution in Africa has absolutely zero effect on the domesticability of African herbivores?
That being the best index of domestication potential around?
uhhh, African hunter gatherers didn't have domesticates. The Kung hunter gatherers never domesticated the cheetah or selectively bred them for hunting.
Look you may think its possible to herd cats just by selectively breeding them, that's your business.
Wolves gravitating to human habitation and humans selectively breeding their more desireable traits overtime and harnessing their pack mentality to make them view their human owners as their pack, is not the same as trying to harness a lion's pride mentality in the oft chance that you might, might suceed in selectively breeding them to turn them into kitty cats, or using them to coral sheep in a pen. Wolves and Lions are two different things. Might aswell ask why the inuits never domesticated whales by harnessing their herd mentality, the economic factor was certainly there, they rely on whale meet.
I'd also point to a general lack of organized cultures which would have seen any need to enlist or tame them for labour. On that point, almost all the Early civilizations across AsiaAfrica made use of elephants as labour animals during their history. If there was no human niche to fit elephants into, there's obviously no opportunity.
Name one sub Saharan African farming community that uses African elephants like Thailand farmers do? In a parallel universe maybe.
I never said that. I was merely point out a fact, Africa has had more large predators than anywhere else in the world. A herd of horses trying to cross a river in Russia, didn't need to worry about crocodiles lying in ambush, unlike an African zebra. To say that these animals are domesticable would be asking them to ignore tens of thousands of years of environmental adaptation.
Well no kidding.
That's only part of the reason, the other reason being their temperament. You and most everyone here seem to want the animal to ignore its evolutionary adaptation to its environment to make him more pliable to domestiction. Pure fantasy.
Why the hell would hippos "habituate" to human presence in the first place?
Granted subsaharan hunter gatherers had better things to do than expend time and energy trying to domesticate these animals, after Europeans arrived why didn't Europeans attempt to domesticate African elephants, hippos and rhinos? Could it be, ohh let's see, because of the fact that they couldn't.
Who are you arguing against? No one said otherwise.
As I said, given the temperament of African sub saharan elephants, and the difficulty involved in taming them, all I said was that, it was likely the carthaginians preferred Asian elephants or a smaller group of Atlas elephants, rather than subsaharran elephants
Or they just brought back an incredible shitload of incredibly long lived Indian elephants that just spent the next couple of centuries knocking around the Mediterranean.
Look, I'm enjoying this. But in terms of plausibility, you should just stick with Fed Ex.
I'd really love to discuss this further with you, but seeing that debating sci fi fanboys is just anout as pointless as the debate between star trek and starwars fanboys.... forget it. again I'll point out, the whole premise of the op question and the animals suggested is asb. The operative word in the title being "cool" animals to domesticate. Rhino cavalry, Woolly mammoths being used as pack animals by prehistoric people is just I'm afraid impossible, I don't care what the Frank Frazetta graphics and the movie "10,000 BC" movie says. You can't friggin do it. ASB and Other Magic ring a bell?
Don't be an asshole. It doesn't lead any place good. It also doesn't lay well in your mouth, considering some of your more spurious assertions.
I don't think that there's a peer reviewed publication which is at this time able to make an assertive case one way or the other. The notion that African megafauna is somehow more sophisticated in dealing with human predation has been around, but its frankly intangible and hard to support.
In some cases, for instance, the extinction of the Moa, one can make the case that the animals were not well equipped to cope with human hunters and lost out. But then again, in the case of Moa, these were slow growing, slow reproducing megafauna who were notably vulnerable to disruption. Even in other 'clearcut' cases - its not so clear cut. The Elephant Birds and Megalemurs of Madagascar may have been as much the victims of deforestation and habitat destruction as hunting. The extinction of North American and Australian Megafauna is often simplistically attributed to human hunting, but there's increasing evidence that the picture is a bit more complex.
The assertion that African fauna are or were generally superior at coping with humans than the fauna of other continents, and therefore less domesticable is interesting but unproven.
Its a difficult hypothesis to test, but it is testable. One could try and compare hunting rates and hunting success/failure in and out of Africa. I don't think that the Cree or Ojibwa, the Yanomano or the Salish, the Nigritos were better or worse hunters than their african counterparts in regions of equivalent biomass.
If, in fact, African animals did have an advantage, I would argue that as much as 60,000 years almost certainly erased that. The time spans work against you. Even taking North America and an occupation date of 12,000 years ago, that's 4000 generations for a great many forms of megafauna. It's hard to believe that animals could not adjust their behavioural frameworks in that time.
There's other ways to test. One could, for instance, look at the flight reflex for comparable African/non-African animals. If your hypothesis is correct, the African animals should have a much higher flight reflex from humans - they should start running earlier and faster from the silhouette of humans than Animals not from Africa.
Yet, so far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a measurable difference. A friend of mine living in Africa told me once of watching a pride of 26 lions cross the road in front of him. There were lots of situations of wildlife relatively close by.
Do African Animals have less of a flight reflex from humans? How is that sensible to your theory. Are they more sophisticated in interpreting human intention? But then, this should make them more domesticable, not less.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Not caring really.
As I've pointed out, there's not a lot of benefit to be gained by trying to selectively breed Cheetahs, because there's not much to select from. No real genetic diversity.
Second, hunter gatherers didn't domesticate animals. They ate them. There's no economic advantage to a hunter gatherer attempting to domesticate an animal. The investment cost of the effort exceeds the short term reward drastically enough that no one makes the effort.
The sole exception seems to be the Dog. But that's a subject in and of itself.
Other situations of subsistence populations incorporating domesticates involve populations acquiring them from borderline agricultural populations.
????
I know it's clearly possible to selectively breed cats for appearance and behaviour. That's pretty much established out in the real world. There's nothing magical about cats.
I don't think anyone has tried to selectively breed cats to exhibit the clustering behaviour of sheep. Strikes me as a bit of a pointless errand. One of those things which involves herculean amounts of time and work with limited prospect of success... and where success gets no better than a 'meh.'
On the other hand, I don't believe its possible to selectively breed cats to speak french.
Y'know, a while back, I read something that suggested that dogs had begun to diverge from wolves before they were domesticated. The implication being that humans did not create dogs, but rather dogs created dogs. This seemed to support theories of autodomestication - literally, animals domesticating themselves or more broadly, habituating to humans and human activity.
Where we seem to be diverging strongly, is that I tend to support notions of auto-domestication, or species habituation as an integral component of most domestication events.
You, with the exception of the 'cat' do not, but seem to cleave to the notion of human driven domestication, one that involves deliberate human manipulation in a kind of socio-economic vaccuum.
I really don't think that either evidence or logic is on your side.
Why would anyone want to do a thing like that? Seriously. For one thing, there aren't any sheep in Africa, so it seems a pointless activity. I suppose that one could choose some African species as a herding beast, but then again, why bother? You'd need a prior domestication event for your sheep analogue, and I'm not sure the local economics would support that. Even given that prior domestication event, lions would be a poor choice for several reasons - dogs are probably already available, already domesticated and very efficient. Lions are much more expensive, being much larger animals. And Lions don't really have the stamina for sustained work.
There's nothing inherent to stop you from making the effort. But it would be quite a lot of effort for very little return. So.... why?
Humans, societies, are not irrational. We don't go out domesticating animals because its fun. There has to be a return.
Well, the Inuit were a subsistence population of hunter gatherers. Subsistence populations usually exist at about 25% of the maximum sustainability threshold of their environment, largely because of transient resource bottlenecks inhibiting the population.
What this means is that they don't particularly need to make the effort to domesticate whales because there are, in season, always more whales than they can eat. There's no feasible way to make that kind of domestication pay a greater return in protein than wild harvesting. To say nothing of the front end expenditure costs of the investment.
In another sense, a key reason that Inuit didn't domesticate whales was because such an effort would be antithetical to their subsistence economy. Put simply, the Inuit moved along on a seasonal cycle, from coasts to interior, taking advantage of animal populations. Whales, seals, fish.... Then Caribou, Hare, Musk Ox, Fox.
The Inuit could have domesticated Caribou. Caribou are basically genetically identical to reindeer. The degree of variation within the two populations markedly exceed the distinctions between them. They didn't.
Why? Does this mean that Caribou are magically immune to domestication? But if we apply your 'out of africa theory', Reindeer had far more experience dealing with humans than Caribou - something like 50,000 years (or 250,000 including neandertals), compared to 12,000. Reindeer should have been much more resistant, and Caribou much easier to domesticate.
The reason that Inuit didn't domesticate Caribou, is one of the reasons the Inuit didn't domesticate whales (and there's lots of other reasons). Because domestication would mean a huge lifestyle cost, huge investment. Domesticate Caribou full time, that means you can't spend half your time accessing sea protein. It's not a guarantee that the return on Caribou protein is going to make up for that loss, and its pretty much a sure thing that you'll run big deficits in the interim. No one likes to starve.
Speaking of whales though - you know what. I think Beluga's might have made a decent potential domesticate.
Nah. Sexual maturity at 6 years? Fourteen month gestation? Reproduce once every three years? Falls outside the outer edge of the economic envelope for big domesticates.
There's some nice things - herd or clustering behaviour, tends to return to the same territories.
On the other hand, its hard to see the advantage. Certainly not a draft animal. Eats fish and its probably as efficient to harvest the fish directly. And the advantage is to simply harvest wild populations, rather than making the effort and undertaking the labour costs of managing a domesticate.
What do you think of Walrus? Just for the hell of it, play along. In terms of maturation, gestation, reproduction, they're as bad as Beluga. But they're benthic bottom feeders and much less inclined to roam.
Why would they want to? Thailand's economy, and the economics that employs elephants is completely different from the Sub-Sahara. That's my consistent point. The niche that exists in Thailand largely doesn't exist in Africa. I don't know why you seem to find this so difficult.
No Bears in Africa. Bears very common in Eurasia and North Am. Some very predatory ones too. Alligators and Crocodiles found throughout tropic regions - India, Southeast Asia, South China, Australia, South America, southern North America. Also, wolves very effective. Tigers endemic to Asia. I'm not sure that your argument is correct, comparing say predator/prey population ratios or comparative biomasses. I think its pretty consistent.
But anyway, is your thesis an argument that African animals are less domesticable, not because they've co-evolved with humans, but because they're subject to a lot more predation? Has your argument changed? What is your argument precisely?
But this is my point! Domestication events are the interactions of multiple factors - economic, social, cultural, physiological. Things like reproduction rates, gestation periods, maturation periods, relative stamina and tolerances, economic utilities, investment costs, maintenance costs, relative comparisons. All these things come into play. I'm talking practical things. Real world stuff.
Your approach borders on the mystical.
Really? Prove it. Show me the ineffable soul of the Rhino that will resist domestication under all circumstances. You accuse people of fantasy, but its pretty clear that your attitude is steeped in mysticism.
I can offer a dozen reasons why a Rhino is a poor prospect.
The Rhino is a browser, but human agriculture almost exclusively favours grazers. Are grazers mystically more amenable to domestication? Not really. It's just that our agriculture - grains and field crops produce food for grazers, not browsers.
The Rhino's age of sexual maturity is 5 to 7 years. That's poor compared to most domesticates that reach sexual maturity in 2 to 4 years. Gestation period is 14 months. Much too long. Reproduces only once every two or three years. Not rapid enough. Those are bad economics compared to other potential domesticates.
Work capacity? Horsepower? Pounds per horsepower? Fodder for Horsepower? Again, poor compared to other domesticates.
Finally, other more efficient domesticates are all in place. So where's the logic? Why does a society undertake the immense costs of selectively breeding Rhinos over a period of time to get a domesticate.... when it already has domesticates who are consistently more efficient workers, faster growers, faster reproducers, and generally better candidates and whose domestication costs have been paid and amortized long ago.
These are meaningful issues.
But your attitude is simply that the 'Rhino is the Rhino and the soul of the Rhino can never be domesticated, because, you know, its a Rhino and they're not domesticable, amen.'
Why am I even bothering with your posts?
You're the one arguing for Hannibal's 'Indian' Elephants. That seems an outrageous proposition.
I can't say that the pleasure is in any way mutual.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
The door? The way out? Not letting it hit you?
I had no idea you were an expert on the social behaviour and temperament of Wooly Mammoths. Normally, that sort of expertise would be fascinating. But somehow....
It could be the door chime. Why don't you go and check?
No hard feelings, but my 'goodbye' is profoundly sincere.
Have a nice day. I certainly hope you find your way to a timeline that you find more stimulating and engaging.