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 until now, when I have some important, work-related writing to procrastinate.
I apologize for all the text.
So, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond gets a lot of love and attention from alternate history fans. Virtually every timeline proposing some anthropological or prehistoric change on this site is impacted by GGS in some way or another. I regard this as a good thing: GGS provides some good, large-scale reasoning that goes a long way toward describing how societies develop.
However, I am very disappointed with one portion of the book: specifically, Chapter 9, which deals with the subject of animal domestication. In this chapter, Diamond proposes that domestic animals have a very uniform set of characteristics, while each undomesticable animal is undomesticable for a different reason (the "Anna Karenina Principle"). He suggests that reasons for undomesticability fit into six basic groups:
Therefore, on this thread, I want to present some argumentation demonstrating the shortcomings of Diamond's reasoning, and discuss how this will impact our anthropological discussions on AH.com.
I am going to focus on one of the six criteria, temperament, because this is the least well-supported and the most difficult to assess of the six, and serves as a very good illustration of the faults I find in Jared Diamond's reasoning. The other five criteria are less controversial and less difficult to assess, but they are also subject to similar problems. By focusing on one criterion, I will also eliminate some excess text.
Aggressive, Unpredictable, Dangerous
These three words are a major part of the "temperament" question. Obviously, animals that are aggressive, unpredictable and dangerous pose more problems for people trying to manage them, and the added risks and troubles might make them unsuitable for domestication. I agree with this. However, I'm not clear on how to measure these attributes and determine the threshold beyond which the risks and problems outweigh the benefits of domestication. Arguably, the solution to such a formula would be quite dynamic and heavily contingent on circumstance, anyway.
But, Jared Diamond mentions specifically several animals: the African buffalo, the hippo, the onager, and the zebras. I'm going to focus mostly on the buffalo here, and I'll come back to the zebra in another post. The African buffalo is notoriously dangerous, frequently described as one of the most dangerous animals in Africa, right up there with rhinos, hippos, lions and elephants. It's supposed to be aggressive and unpredictable, and Jared Diamond simply dismisses it as a possible domesticate on this reasoning
The implication of this reasoning is that the African buffalo is more aggressive, more unpredictable, more dangerous than any of the large bovines that were domesticated by people: the aurochs (wild cow), the water buffalo, the yak, the banteng, and the gaur (mithun). So, surely Diamond has some really good reasoning the demonstrates that the African buffalo is more aggressive than these, right? Actually, no, he doesn't: he just states that it is so, then moves on. So, it looks like we get to the do the work ourselves.
And, what we find is that it's not really clear exactly how dangerous the African buffalo is. The notion that it is exceptionally dangerous comes primarily from the scuttlebutt of big-game hunters, and from a bunch of semi-viral internet videos; but I haven't been able to find any reliable statistics that give a sense of how dangerous the animal actually is. So, all I have to go on is the anecdotes and rumors and YouTube videos that I can find. Of course, these all suffer from a major lack of context, because it's rare for anybody to report an anecdote of an African buffalo not attacking, and it's even rarer for anybody to report an anecdote about any other wild bovine doing anything.
Interestingly, one can still find conflicting opinions from people claiming to be in the know, variously stating that the buffalo does or does not entirely deserve its bad reputation. Even more interesting, one can find all the same kinds of anecdotes and reports for many of the other bovines, including the gaur, the water buffalo, the yak and (in historical records) the aurochs. But, since these animals are less frequently encountered by modern Westerners, there is even less information and less clarity on the issue of their aggressiveness. So, what means do we have to compare the aggressiveness of these animals and definitively conclude that the African buffalo and the bison are too aggressive, while the aurochs, the gaur, the water buffalo and the yak are not?
There actually is one bovine for which useful statistics exist: the American bison, which is often thought of as too aggressive and too dangerous to domesticate. A herd of bison lives in Yellowstone National Park, and records of injuries and deaths are faithfully kept there. For example, this publication reports that, over a 20-year period (1980-1999), bison caused 79 injuries and 1 death, while grizzly bears caused 24 injuries and 2 deaths over the same period. The publication then declares the bison as the most dangerous animal in Yellowstone.
The error in this publication should be pretty easy to point out: in Yellowstone, bison outnumber bears, 6 to 1. That means that the per-capita rate of injuries is nearly twice as high for bears as it is for bison. Also, bison live in areas where they are more likely to be seen and encountered by humans, whereas bears stick to the more rugged backcountry where fewer human visitors go. So, it's pretty safe to assume that humans encounter bison much more frequently than they encounter bears, and yet, bears cause injuries at a twofold higher per-capita rate. So, it's clearly erroneous to claim that bison are more dangerous than bears.
So, why does this mean?
But, this leaves us with a question: just how dangerous is the American bison? Indeed, how dangerous is the African buffalo? Is it more dangerous than the aurochs (wild cow) was? The answer is, maybe, but we simply don't know. So, how can Diamond have any confidence in the claim that the African buffalo is too dangerous to domesticate, while the aurochs and the water buffalo are not?
Well, how else do you explain why some bovines were domesticated while others weren't? All of them fit Diamond's other criteria, so aggressiveness is the only one that might pose a problem. Unfortunately, in the past, the alternatives to Diamond's explanation are racist in nature: Africans and Native Americans were not clever enough or innovative enough to figure out how to domesticate. Since most of us want to avoid making that argument, it seems that we must agree that Diamond is right: the buffalo and the bison must just be too darned aggressive to domesticate. But, this sort of ad hoc reasoning is circular and self-serving, and it does nothing to demonstrate the success of Diamond's model. If we do not know, then we simply do not know, and all our desires to avoid racism do not make Diamond's model definitively accurate.
Fortunately, as it turns out, this is a false dichotomy: we don't have to choose between buffalo being too aggressive and Black people being too stupid. Personally, I do not believe that a perfectly domesticable animal going undomesticated in any way points to the intellectual inferiority of the people who had an opportunity to domesticate it. And, I am not aware of any real evidence that suggests a racial basis for intellect or innovativeness, so let's go ahead and eliminate that argument. Suffice it to say, I think the answer lies in the environment, rather than in the intellect of the people or in the "just right" characteristics of the animal. Domestication is not a simple matter of catching an animal and putting it in a cage, then thinking up some ingenious means of using it for one's own ends: it's an ecological mutualism between humans and animals, and certain environments are more conducive to the formation of these mutualisms than others. More on that some other time.
But, the bottom line is that Diamond used some very non-substantive information to back up a vague conclusion. And now, Diamond's unsubstantiated word carries tremendous weight in alternative history discussions, and the claim that "all animals that could be domesticated have been domesticated," is still pitched around sometimes. This aggression criterion has become sort of a fall-back position: if an animal meets all the other five criteria, but still wasn't domesticated, well it must be because it was too hard to handle. But, we just don't know how hard to handle our current domesticates were before we domesticated them, nor how much of a setback this "hard to handle" thing would have been for a person who might have been suitably motivated to domesticate it.
So, if aggression is the only criterion on which an animal fails to measure up to the standards of domesticability, let's be cautious about discounting it.
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 until now, when I have some important, work-related writing to procrastinate.
I apologize for all the text.
So, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond gets a lot of love and attention from alternate history fans. Virtually every timeline proposing some anthropological or prehistoric change on this site is impacted by GGS in some way or another. I regard this as a good thing: GGS provides some good, large-scale reasoning that goes a long way toward describing how societies develop.
However, I am very disappointed with one portion of the book: specifically, Chapter 9, which deals with the subject of animal domestication. In this chapter, Diamond proposes that domestic animals have a very uniform set of characteristics, while each undomesticable animal is undomesticable for a different reason (the "Anna Karenina Principle"). He suggests that reasons for undomesticability fit into six basic groups:
[FONT="]1. [/FONT]Diet flexibility and efficiency
[FONT="]2. [/FONT]Growth and reproductive rates
[FONT="]3. [/FONT]Captive breeding
[FONT="]4. [/FONT]Temperament
[FONT="]5. [/FONT]Tendency to panic
[FONT="]6. [/FONT]Social hierarchy
Basically, these serve as six criteria by which we can ostensibly determine whether it is possible or likely for a species to be domesticated. While I agree with the premise that some animals are less suitable than others for domestication, and I agree that these six criteria are likely important factors in the history of domestication, I believe that the criteria are too ambiguous and too poorly supported to be of any real use. Consequently, I do not believe that Diamond can actually distinguish between which animals can and which cannot be domesticated, and his claim that all domesticable animals have already been domesticated is therefore highly dubious.[FONT="]2. [/FONT]Growth and reproductive rates
[FONT="]3. [/FONT]Captive breeding
[FONT="]4. [/FONT]Temperament
[FONT="]5. [/FONT]Tendency to panic
[FONT="]6. [/FONT]Social hierarchy
Therefore, on this thread, I want to present some argumentation demonstrating the shortcomings of Diamond's reasoning, and discuss how this will impact our anthropological discussions on AH.com.
I am going to focus on one of the six criteria, temperament, because this is the least well-supported and the most difficult to assess of the six, and serves as a very good illustration of the faults I find in Jared Diamond's reasoning. The other five criteria are less controversial and less difficult to assess, but they are also subject to similar problems. By focusing on one criterion, I will also eliminate some excess text.
Aggressive, Unpredictable, Dangerous
These three words are a major part of the "temperament" question. Obviously, animals that are aggressive, unpredictable and dangerous pose more problems for people trying to manage them, and the added risks and troubles might make them unsuitable for domestication. I agree with this. However, I'm not clear on how to measure these attributes and determine the threshold beyond which the risks and problems outweigh the benefits of domestication. Arguably, the solution to such a formula would be quite dynamic and heavily contingent on circumstance, anyway.
But, Jared Diamond mentions specifically several animals: the African buffalo, the hippo, the onager, and the zebras. I'm going to focus mostly on the buffalo here, and I'll come back to the zebra in another post. The African buffalo is notoriously dangerous, frequently described as one of the most dangerous animals in Africa, right up there with rhinos, hippos, lions and elephants. It's supposed to be aggressive and unpredictable, and Jared Diamond simply dismisses it as a possible domesticate on this reasoning
The implication of this reasoning is that the African buffalo is more aggressive, more unpredictable, more dangerous than any of the large bovines that were domesticated by people: the aurochs (wild cow), the water buffalo, the yak, the banteng, and the gaur (mithun). So, surely Diamond has some really good reasoning the demonstrates that the African buffalo is more aggressive than these, right? Actually, no, he doesn't: he just states that it is so, then moves on. So, it looks like we get to the do the work ourselves.
And, what we find is that it's not really clear exactly how dangerous the African buffalo is. The notion that it is exceptionally dangerous comes primarily from the scuttlebutt of big-game hunters, and from a bunch of semi-viral internet videos; but I haven't been able to find any reliable statistics that give a sense of how dangerous the animal actually is. So, all I have to go on is the anecdotes and rumors and YouTube videos that I can find. Of course, these all suffer from a major lack of context, because it's rare for anybody to report an anecdote of an African buffalo not attacking, and it's even rarer for anybody to report an anecdote about any other wild bovine doing anything.
Interestingly, one can still find conflicting opinions from people claiming to be in the know, variously stating that the buffalo does or does not entirely deserve its bad reputation. Even more interesting, one can find all the same kinds of anecdotes and reports for many of the other bovines, including the gaur, the water buffalo, the yak and (in historical records) the aurochs. But, since these animals are less frequently encountered by modern Westerners, there is even less information and less clarity on the issue of their aggressiveness. So, what means do we have to compare the aggressiveness of these animals and definitively conclude that the African buffalo and the bison are too aggressive, while the aurochs, the gaur, the water buffalo and the yak are not?
There actually is one bovine for which useful statistics exist: the American bison, which is often thought of as too aggressive and too dangerous to domesticate. A herd of bison lives in Yellowstone National Park, and records of injuries and deaths are faithfully kept there. For example, this publication reports that, over a 20-year period (1980-1999), bison caused 79 injuries and 1 death, while grizzly bears caused 24 injuries and 2 deaths over the same period. The publication then declares the bison as the most dangerous animal in Yellowstone.
The error in this publication should be pretty easy to point out: in Yellowstone, bison outnumber bears, 6 to 1. That means that the per-capita rate of injuries is nearly twice as high for bears as it is for bison. Also, bison live in areas where they are more likely to be seen and encountered by humans, whereas bears stick to the more rugged backcountry where fewer human visitors go. So, it's pretty safe to assume that humans encounter bison much more frequently than they encounter bears, and yet, bears cause injuries at a twofold higher per-capita rate. So, it's clearly erroneous to claim that bison are more dangerous than bears.
So, why does this mean?
But, this leaves us with a question: just how dangerous is the American bison? Indeed, how dangerous is the African buffalo? Is it more dangerous than the aurochs (wild cow) was? The answer is, maybe, but we simply don't know. So, how can Diamond have any confidence in the claim that the African buffalo is too dangerous to domesticate, while the aurochs and the water buffalo are not?
Well, how else do you explain why some bovines were domesticated while others weren't? All of them fit Diamond's other criteria, so aggressiveness is the only one that might pose a problem. Unfortunately, in the past, the alternatives to Diamond's explanation are racist in nature: Africans and Native Americans were not clever enough or innovative enough to figure out how to domesticate. Since most of us want to avoid making that argument, it seems that we must agree that Diamond is right: the buffalo and the bison must just be too darned aggressive to domesticate. But, this sort of ad hoc reasoning is circular and self-serving, and it does nothing to demonstrate the success of Diamond's model. If we do not know, then we simply do not know, and all our desires to avoid racism do not make Diamond's model definitively accurate.
Fortunately, as it turns out, this is a false dichotomy: we don't have to choose between buffalo being too aggressive and Black people being too stupid. Personally, I do not believe that a perfectly domesticable animal going undomesticated in any way points to the intellectual inferiority of the people who had an opportunity to domesticate it. And, I am not aware of any real evidence that suggests a racial basis for intellect or innovativeness, so let's go ahead and eliminate that argument. Suffice it to say, I think the answer lies in the environment, rather than in the intellect of the people or in the "just right" characteristics of the animal. Domestication is not a simple matter of catching an animal and putting it in a cage, then thinking up some ingenious means of using it for one's own ends: it's an ecological mutualism between humans and animals, and certain environments are more conducive to the formation of these mutualisms than others. More on that some other time.
But, the bottom line is that Diamond used some very non-substantive information to back up a vague conclusion. And now, Diamond's unsubstantiated word carries tremendous weight in alternative history discussions, and the claim that "all animals that could be domesticated have been domesticated," is still pitched around sometimes. This aggression criterion has become sort of a fall-back position: if an animal meets all the other five criteria, but still wasn't domesticated, well it must be because it was too hard to handle. But, we just don't know how hard to handle our current domesticates were before we domesticated them, nor how much of a setback this "hard to handle" thing would have been for a person who might have been suitably motivated to domesticate it.
So, if aggression is the only criterion on which an animal fails to measure up to the standards of domesticability, let's be cautious about discounting it.
Last edited: