Guns, Germs and Steel

[Sven]

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:

[FONT=&quot]1. [/FONT]Diet flexibility and efficiency
[FONT=&quot]2. [/FONT]Growth and reproductive rates
[FONT=&quot]3. [/FONT]Captive breeding
[FONT=&quot]4. [/FONT]Temperament
[FONT=&quot]5. [/FONT]Tendency to panic
[FONT=&quot]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.

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.

 

[DaleCoz]

My guess: It took experience with smaller, easier to domesticate animals before a culture took on the bigger, more aggressive animals like bison. In North America, the only domestic animals were dogs, and turkeys in a few places. In Africa, cattle became available fairly early and preempted the need to domesticate something else in the same size category.

Cattle-sized animals were also much easier to cope with once horses were domesticated, so presence or absence of horses probably made a big difference.

 

[twovultures]

Thing is with the non-domestication of the cape buffalo, I don't think that environmental factors apply. When domesticated cattle were were introduced to sub-saharan Africa, they became widespread showing that there was a place for 'ecological mutualism' between humans and a cattle like animal.

However, cattle are not actually good domesticates for Africa. They're very water-hungry, vulnerable to sleeping sickness, and inefficient (the breeds that can take the tropical heat produce smaller amounts of milk and meat). In areas were cattle were less than ideal domestic animals, other animals were domesticated to fill their niche (like the camels in the central Asian and Arabian deserts).

If cape buffalo or eland are domesticable, their lack of domestication is not explained by environmental factors or the introduction of cattle.

 

[Dave Howery]

one other factor too: cattle, sheep, horses, and goats can be herded out in the open (especially if you have dogs helping), without fencing. Basically, once you've established dominance over their young, you can herd them, move them from place to place, and they generally will go where you want. And temperament has to be involved in some way; it's notable that even cattle and horses that have gone wild will respond to human dominance. The old west cattle drives were done with longhorns that had been born wild, and the feral horses of the west are routinely captured and broken to the saddle.
Other animals might be domesticated eventually by penning them up for generation after generation (bison are an example of this), but as far as stone age agriculturalists are concerned, they flat out can't be domesticated; they didn't have access to modern fencing materials, which is what it takes to pen in some critters. Bison are 'farmed' now mainly by putting them inside strong fences. The first attempts to ranch them saw that bison are notorious fence busters. And I've never heard that humans can dominate bison calves the way that they can cattle.
I've wondered if pigs might not be an example of an animal that was tamed through generations of being penned. The wild kind don't seem the type of animal to be dominated by humans, and you certainly can't herd them. So, I wonder if people just kept them penned up, fed them leftovers and the like, and eventually bred the worst of the aggressiveness out of them...

 

[Daztur]

Also once you've already got a domestic animal that fills a certain niche you don't bother going out looking for more that fill the same niche. It's a lot easier to just use the one you've got than go through all of the bother of domesticating a new one. We can see this with a lot of big global crops (corn, rice, etc.) pushing out local cultivars (and preventing people from making the effort to domesticate local plants) and I'm sure that the same applies with animals.

For example if you butterfly away cats I'm sure there'd be more animals bred (aside from terriers and ferrets) that fill the vermin catching niche somewhere in the world, there's just not as much need when cats are so good at it. And I'm sure if there weren't other small livestock available you'd see a lot more Old World rat domestication.

 

[Bob the Great]

I've wondered if pigs might not be an example of an animal that was tamed through generations of being penned. The wild kind don't seem the type of animal to be dominated by humans, and you certainly can't herd them. So, I wonder if people just kept them penned up, fed them leftovers and the like, and eventually bred the worst of the aggressiveness out of them...

I'm fairly certain that pigs are significantly more intelligent than bison. If this is true, its possible that the aggressiveness and independence of wild pigs was a learned one rather than an inherent one (while domestic pigs learn to live under humans).

Though your hypothesis could work too, since pigs are probably less able to knock over barriers and faster breeding makes the adaption go by much quicker.



In response to the OP, I think I'm going to have to side with Diamond on this one, though I do agree to the point that there is no solid line dividing "too aggressive" and "not too aggressive". I'd go further and say that all six categories are fluid and flexible, and are dependent on the environment (including other available animals) and the demography+society of the people living there (which, if JD is to be believed, is also a reflection of the environment).

EDIT: also, I believe that the characteristics don't prevent humans from domesticating them, by just lengthen the time it takes. Though not related to animals, Diamond does state that the Aboriginal Australians would likely have been able to develop their own civilization from domestic plants in a few more millennium (but then Europe happened).

 

[BlondieBC]

One point related to Diamond, he is proposing a hypothesis, not testing it. To say any animal is too "aggressive", we would first need to define a way to measure it. Then we would need to capture wild, never domesticated animals, and domesticate them from scratch. Then we can say with scientific authority. Right now we just have just speculation.

Now you bring up cattle, but the problem is we lack the original animal to test. So we are comparing an animal with thousands of years of domestic man-made selection with a wild animal. Having been around cattle as a child in North America, I can assure you wild Bison are much more dangerous than a cow. But that does not really mean much, unless it was also true in the wild ancestor. There are also other disadvantages. Calf every two years, not one. Again, was it true with the original cattle? Bison can easily jump any standard cattle fence. And they escape more often. Now Bison have a big advantage, they are better adapted to the NA snow seasons and grasses, but presumable this was not true for the cattle's original range.

So why were cattle over Bison domesticated? My guess, in order of likeliness.

1) It is easier to domesticate cattle where you have already learned how with other animals. Sheep Goats.

2) It is easier to domesticate cattle once you have domesticated grains and have settle towns.

3) Cattle were less aggressive than American Bison.

4) There could be lots of other possible reason - cultural or religious issues, climate issues, dogs, horses, some technology, etc.

 

[Sven]

Thing is with the non-domestication of the cape buffalo, I don't think that environmental factors apply. When domesticated cattle were were introduced to sub-saharan Africa, they became widespread showing that there was a place for 'ecological mutualism' between humans and a cattle like animal...

If cape buffalo or eland are domesticable, their lack of domestication is not explained by environmental factors or the introduction of cattle.

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.

It isn't about whether a human society would benefit from simply having a certain domestic animal: it's about whether the intermediate stages between "wild" and "domestic" are likely to come about within that environment.

Consider: sub-Saharan Africa is a biodiversity hotspot. There are dozens of species of ungulates all living in close proximity to each other. For example, here is a list of ungulates living in Botswana, a small, landlocked sub-Saharan country covered in mostly desert and dry savannah. I count 31 species of ungulates.

That gives a hunter a lot of options. We can make a few predictions about how a hunter might behave when he has so many options to choose from. First, we might expect him to be somewhat selective: he might avoid the dangerous, difficult and less desirable options. Second, we might also predict that he will not rely heavily on any one species, and will consequently not develop a close association with any one species.

These two predictions are exactly what we see. Sub-Saharan Africans rarely hunt large, dangerous animals, such as buffalo, rhinoceros, elephant or giraffe, and frequently hunt various antelope and zebra instead. Additionally, sub-Saharan African societies are not closely or exclusively tied to any one prey species, but regularly switch between impala, bongo, kudu, zebra, etc.

On the other hand, Eurasia is a very different story. For example, Turkey is a somewhat larger country than Botswana (in terms of land area), but its ungulate fauna consists of a little more than half as many species (including extinct megafauna), and population densities of these animals are much lower. So, we can make a few predictions about how a hunter might behave in this case. First, we might expect him to be less selective, and include the more dangerous and difficult prey in his diet. Second, we might also predict that he would become dependent on and develop close associations with specific species.

And, again, these two predictions are exactly what we see. Early humans in Eurasia frequently hunted big, dangerous megafauna that they would have avoided in Africa (hunted most of them to extinction, in fact). And, humans in Eurasia frequently developed close associations with individual species of animals (e.g. Botai culture and horse, Sami and reindeer, etc). In some cases, these close associations led to domestication.

So, some environments force humans into close associations with specific animal species, which then makes the jump to true domestication more likely. However, environments with more options do not foster the development of these close associations.

This seems a much more plausible and elegant explanation than the Diamondian notion that a whole bunch of perfect candidate livestock just happened to live in the same location, while the rest of the world is utterly devoid of them.

 

[Sven]

one other factor too: cattle, sheep, horses, and goats can be herded out in the open (especially if you have dogs helping), without fencing. Basically, once you've established dominance over their young, you can herd them, move them from place to place, and they generally will go where you want. And temperament has to be involved in some way; it's notable that even cattle and horses that have gone wild will respond to human dominance. The old west cattle drives were done with longhorns that had been born wild, and the feral horses of the west are routinely captured and broken to the saddle.

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 unclear whether herding in the open was a key attribute in horse domestication.

The wild ancestors of goats and sheep are still extant, so we could still get information from them to test my hypothesis. Do you know how these wild animals respond to herding?

Also, in the Western USA, wildlife agencies are often involved in wildlife trades between states. When I worked a summer job out there, they had a bunch of corrals for catching pronghorns. They can drive the pronghorns into the corrals, but they're a bit more flighty than horses or cattle, so it's touchy work, but it can be done.

I've wondered if pigs might not be an example of an animal that was tamed through generations of being penned.

I've thought the same thing. Pigs are certainly something of a outlier among domestic livestock.

One of the things that supports your hypothesis is the genetic evidence. For horses, cattle, sheep and goats, all domestic animals descend from just a few source populations, which suggests that they were only brought out of the wild a few times, and they spread when these original domestic herds grew.

Not so for the pig. Domestic pigs seem to be related to many different populations and subspecies of the wild boar, which suggests that they were repeatedly taken out of the wild in many different regions. The expansion of domestic pigs seems to therefore have been through spread of the knowledge of how to catch pigs, rather than the growth of an original domestic herd.


Interestingly, this also suggests that humans preferred to import domesticated horses, cattle, sheep and goats from outside their area, rather than attempt to capture and domesticate wild animals from the local populations. To me, this indicates that the domesticated form had been made more domesticable than the wild form. This makes me wonder of "domesticability" might be a consequence, rather than a cause, of domestication.

 

[Sven]

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 domestication, again because of its unsuitable temperament. The specific points he alludes to are: (1) zebras bite hard and refuse to let go; (2) zebras cause more injuries in zoos than tigers; and (3) zebras are virtually impossible to lasso; (4) humans tried to domesticate zebras in the 19th century, and ultimately failed.

My first impulse is to completely reject this idea. After all, humans domesticated several dangerous bovines and the wild boar, and they tamed elephants, so I have a hard time believing that zebra biting and lasso-dodging would really preclude domestication. Nevertheless, I have no personal experience with zebras or with attempting to domesticate any wild animal, so I'm not in a good position to judge that. So, let's take these points, one at a time, and see what we can find.

1. Biting

This is apparently true: zebras do bite and hold on. I found a site called Zebra Mania, which is a message board for zebra enthusiasts, where people who own or want to own zebras can chat about them. There are testimonials of posters who were bitten and seriously injured by zebras, so I think it's safe to say that Diamond is right: zebras can be nasty biters. However, the general consensus on the Zebra Mania board seems to be that the problem is manageable, and there are many people who are keeping and breeding zebras around the world in spite of this biting problem. Even the poster who was severely injured describes it as a "small risk." In short, I'm not convinced that this would have deterred any serious domestication attempt (after all, it hasn't deterred this small hobbyist/enthusiast community).

2. Zoo Injuries

This is a surprisingly hard topic to find statistics for: apparently, the American Zoo and Aquarium Association doesn't release statistics on animal-caused injuries, so the only way to get this information is to request it directly, and zoos are (understandably) reluctant to divulge this information. On that same zebra message board, there seems to have been a campaign to find out whether zebras in zoos really cause as many injuries as Jared Diamond claims in GGS: none of them were able to find a source for the claim, and at least one zoo representative apparently expressed doubts. I'm not sure how to evaluate this claim in the absence of information, but I'm highly skeptical that zebras cause more injuries than tigers.

3. Lasso Avoidance

The claim about lassos is my favorite one. I have to admit that, when I first read it, I laughed at it: zebras having magical lasso-dodging powers was just so absurd. But, to my surprise, Diamond seems to have a source for his claim here. Apparently, in the early 20th century, some game farmers hired an experienced cowboy to try to lasso a zebra. After 11 tries, he still couldn't catch the zebra. Of course, that just describes one cowboy's experience with one zebra. Incidentally, there's also a documentary film from 1911 called Lassoing Wild Animals in Africa (no joke), in which American cowboys Kearton and Jones are reported to have lassoed many African animals, including zebras. I have not seen the film, but there are also written accounts (page 121) of the expedition. So, at this point, we have two data points: one report of a cowboy who couldn't lasso a zebra, and one report of a cowboy who successfully lassoed zebras.

Okay, so now that I feel very silly for droning on about lassoing zebras, let's be serious: lassoing isn't the only way to catch a wild animal. You can also drive them into corrals, or hunt the parents and catch the young. Also, sub-Saharan Africans were very good at persistence hunting, so they could possibly have chased a zebra down and gotten close enough to put a noose on it.

4. Failure to Domesticate

And, finally, people frequently recite a certain mantra: "all attempts to domesticate the zebra have failed." This is the most irritating argument to hear, because it's a total misrepresentation of the facts. There are several well-documented cases of zebras being tamed and used to draw carriages and to carry riders. There's even one example of a zebra being trained for competitive show-jumping. And, here (p. 310-313) is a book by an experienced horseman, Captain Horace Hayes, who regarded the plains zebra (but not so much the mountain zebra) as very suitable for domestication, having tamed and saddle-broken the species himself quite easily, and having noted its calm demeanor and willingness to breed in confinement.

If you ask Diamond, these were "especially well-organized projects aimed at domestication, carried out by modern scientific animal breeders and geneticists." That's a blatant misrepresentation: they were hobbyists and novelty enthusiasts. Remember that the horse was being corralled and milked for thousands of years before people started riding it, so to dismiss the zebra after the hobby of a couple eccentrics didn't catch on is a bit premature. The only "failure" in zebra domestication seems to be the failure to actually attempt it.

Comparisons

As with the bovines, zebra domesticability will need to be assessed by comparisons with equivalent domesticates: horse and donkey. However, as most people seem to be aware, domestic animals are usually bred for pleasant temperament, so currently domestic animals do not serve as a useful model for the temperament of their wild predecessors. So, is the zebra really more aggressive, more unpredictable, more dangerous than the wild horse (tarpan) was? Again, we don't know, because the tarpan went extinct before anybody was keeping statistics. But, in this case, there is a wealth of other potentially useful information. For example, Przewalski's horse is very closely related to the modern domestic horse (the two were the same species about 160,000 years ago). Przewalski's horse is regarded as feisty and intractable. So, perhaps this is the best baseline we have for assessing the temperament of the tarpan. But, that's highly uncertain, so let's not rely on that alone.

There's also something quite interesting about the horse archaeologically. Archaeological evidence apparently suggests that the horse was the single most common prey item for humans for almost as long as humans have been in Eurasia (48,000 years). Yet, strangely enough, the cow, pig, sheep and goat were all domesticated thousands of years before the horse. In fact, out of the thousands of humans — probably hundreds of different tribes and cultures — that had the opportunity to domesticate the horse, apparently only one or two ever got around to domesticating it, and that was after 40,000 years of relying on it for food.

So, if the horse was such an important food item and was perfectly suitable for domestication, why was it not one of the first animals domesticated? And, why did so many cultures forego the opportunity to domesticate it? Here are some possibilities:

1. The horse was harder to domesticate than the cow, pig, sheep or goat, perhaps because its temperament was too unruly.
2. The horse didn't need to be domesticated at first, because it could be obtained easily enough from the wild; or, a semi-domestic relationship (cf. Sami and reindeer) was sufficient for the early humans' purposes.
3. The cow, pig, sheep and/or goat actually made better livestock for meat and milk, so the horse was unnecessary until they discovered it was useful for transport.

All three of these possibilities represent a significant challenge to the Diamondian paradigm.

1. Harder to domesticate

In the first case, the animal effectively starts out as undomesticable, then later becomes domesticable. Maybe society had to develop in a certain way before the secret for horse domestication could be unlocked. Or, maybe horses had to evolve into their domesticable state through thousands of years of selection due to their close interaction with humans. Either way, this suggests that there is more to "domesticability" than the raw behavioral characteristics of the wild animal.

2. Semi-domestication was sufficient

In the second case, there is another variable in the mix: the motive for humans to domesticate. Jared Diamond argues that all humans have a propensity to take pets, which suggests that the motive to domesticate should be universal. That's pretty flimsy: there is wide variation among cultures in the propensity to take pets: the Bushmen, for example, don't seem to have been very extensive pet-takers (they apparently have dogs, though). Horses were originally very common throughout Eurasia, and gradually declined over time. By the time they were first domesticated on the Eurasian steppes, they were quite rare indeed. So, perhaps the decline in wild-horse availability made it necessary to push for full domestication. In contrast, sub-Saharan hunters might simply have switched to hunting different quarry when a favored prey became rare. So, clearly, it's possible for the motive to domesticate to be different for different cultures.

3. Other animals made better livestock

In the third case, you introduce yet another variable: a pre-existing domestication can pre-empt efforts to start a new domestication. The "failures" to domesticate zebras in the 19th-20th centuries could very easily be attributed to the wild zebra's unfavorable comparison with the already domesticated horse. Additionally, this also raises questions about how suitable the tarpan was for domestication: surely, if it was suitable, and was so important to humans, and humans have such a universal, strong propensity to domesticate, surely so many tribes and cultures and generations would not have foregone the opportunity to domesticate it.

Additional Information

On a related note, various Arctic peoples have a sort of "semi-domestic" relationship with reindeer. As most of us probably know, the reindeer is the same species as the animal from North American called the caribou, which is also an important animal for some of the indigenous population here. However, interestingly enough, the caribou is not considered domesticable, and people who wanted to introduce herding to the Native peoples of Alaska imported reindeer from Siberia, instead of attempting to herd native caribou. So, even though the people from Siberia do not selectively breed their reindeer, it seems that their animals have become more "domesticable" than wild members of the species during their interaction with humans.

People living on the Eurasian steppes seem to have had a similar "semi-domesticated" relationship with horses prior to the complete domestication of the horse: there were corrals, and evidence of milking, etc. So, it's very possible that these early "horse-herders" had the same effect on their horses as the Siberian people had on their reindeer. Given the fact that horses were domesticated in only one location (maybe two), and the domestic herd spread from there, it seems very likely to me that the early horse-herders had induced some alteration in their horses that made them more suitable for domestication than their wild relatives.

Would-be zebra-domesticators seem to have skipped this "intermediate" step. So, if there had been such a thing as "zebra-herders" in sub-Saharan Africa, we might well have seen a similar change in zebra temperament over time that could have led to domestication. But, as it stands, there was no motive for sub-Saharan hunters to develop such a close association with zebras, and, consequently, zebra temperament compares unfavorably with domestic horse temperament, and Jared Diamond claims that this made it impossible to domesticate zebras.

But, I think this essay should establish enough doubt in the Diamondian concept of domesticability, that we should probably start focusing more on other factors, like the environment, than on the specific characteristics of potential animal domesticates.

-----

However, I have to make one concession: my reasoning does not apply so well to North America. North America and Eurasia are quite similar environments, so it stands to reason that North Americans should have shown similar rates of domestication as Eurasians, but they didn't. So, I am forced to acknowledge that the Diamondian paradigm actually might work when comparing Eurasia to North America: i.e., American bison may simply not be suitable for domestication, the way horses were.

One possible way for me to "wiggle out" of this conundrum is to point out that the Native Americans did not cause a major decline in bison numbers, as the Native Eurasians did to the horse, so they may simply have never reached a point where bison domestication was essential enough to motivate them to do it.

But, in all honesty, I have to admit that bison-herding seems a much taller order than horse-herding, and I can't see the same sort of thing happening with the bison.

 

[RGB]

Regarding zebras, I hasten to point out that domestic horses and donkeys (but especially horses) are also, to this day, vicious-tempered biters with a very impressive set of jaws. If their teeth were any sharper they'd be taking off body parts rather regularly.

We still domesticated them.

The other example that I really really like is the Russian Fox (as bred by the Novosibirsk Institute of Cytology). Because that was the USSR and they could spend money if they wanted on long-term projects like that, they took the fox (considered easily tamable but un-domesticatable by the vast majority of hobbyists (unlike wolves they're only weakly social, they're even more carnivorous than wolves are, and so on. They fail plenty of Diamond's criteria).

Within a few decades they had a perfectly domesticated animal that behaved a lot like a regular dog.

So you can domesticate foxes. You just need incentive. Ancient Eurasians didn't have incentive to domesticate foxes because a similar working animal (the wolf) was much easier to start working with, while by the time people decided they could do with a furry pet/minor pest control animal, the cat was already an option, spread via human contact.

So perhaps the Zebra's "undomesticability" lies not with anything inherent to Zebras, but with the humans around them (who never needed them for anything other than a sporadic food source and never worked on them).

 

[Tripwire]

I've heard a theory that the zebra is undomesticable because it evolved alongside human predators for hundreds of thousands of years, and they thus have an inherent hatred of humans. Whereas you could conceivably have found groups of horses that had never been preyed upon by humans before. It is interesting that virtually all animals were domesticated outside of Africa. The only exception I can think of is some cattle breeds, and I don't even know if those are indigenous to the continent.

At any rate, in support of this theory, I've seen video of guys in some god-forsaken hard-to-reach place in the arctic wrestling around with some species of wild deer. The deer had never seen humans before and had no fear of them.

 

[Dave Howery]

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 unclear whether herding in the open was a key attribute in horse domestication.

The wild ancestors of goats and sheep are still extant, so we could still get information from them to test my hypothesis. Do you know how these wild animals respond to herding?

I don't think wild sheep herd worth a damn, mainly because they still have their long legs; our ancestors bred those out of the original stock. The main point of domestication though, is that you establish dominance over the young, not adults. If I had to guess how it all started out, I'd say it was ancient farmers who killed off all the adults in a herd and captured the young, keeping them around for future meals and finding that they could control them (of course, this probably took a hell of a long time and trial and error). Which is kind of what we are dancing around on this topic... how hard is it to establish dominance over the young of any given species? I'd say that cattle, sheep, and horses were domesticated mainly because it's a lot easier for them. Sure, you might be able to domesticate a zebra if you confine them in strong pens for generations, but if you're a stone age farmer, that's not really an option. Also, I wouldn't put too much emphasis on stone age corrals; even with our absolutely utterly domesticated critters today, you still have to pen them to do anything with them. If you want to milk a cow, shear a sheep, or saddle a horse, you have to get them into a pen first; they won't let you do anything out in an open field. My point on herding was that those animals can be grazed and herded out in the open without fencing, and men (with canine help) can manage them easily enough. Not so with with most of the big animals around...

 

[Sven]

I've heard a theory that the zebra is undomesticable because it evolved alongside human predators for hundreds of thousands of years, and they thus have an inherent hatred of humans.

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 erectines were hunting these animals in Eurasia for a long time before Homo sapiens, so that should have counteracted the human-naivete to some extent.

Also, the fauna in North America should have been even more naive and more domesticable, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Of course, maybe their naivete was just so extreme that it made them prone to extinction.

Which is kind of what we are dancing around on this topic... how hard is it to establish dominance over the young of any given species? I'd say that cattle, sheep, and horses were domesticated mainly because it's a lot easier for them.

Well, I have to admit that it's possible that this is exactly how it is. But, I still have a hard time swallowing the idea that all the animals with this sort of behavioral compatibility just happened to live in basically two regions of the planet (Middle East/Eurasia and Southeastern Asia).

You could argue that certain environments select for "domesticable" behaviors in animals. I mean, that's pretty much what my thesis is for human behavior. But there are no consistent environmental variables, either: "domesticable" animals live on the plains, in the forests, in the mountains, and in the deserts. They live in tropical climates and arctic climates and everything in between. The only consistent variable that I can think of is that sub-Saharan Africa has a higher diversity of ungulates than anywhere in Eurasia does. But, why would environments with fewer ungulate species select for animals that are easier to domesticate?

So, not only has this innate behavioral compatibility never been demonstrated to exist, but it would also be completely inexplicable if it did exist.

 

[twovultures]

But, I still have a hard time swallowing the idea that all the animals with this sort of behavioral compatibility just happened to live in basically two regions of the planet (Middle East/Eurasia and Southeastern Asia).

Actually, three of the big 5 were pretty widespread outside these areas. Horses, cattle and pigs roamed from Europe to East Asia (although horses had less overlap with major human population centers, being more of a steppe animal).

Granted, the Middle East had access to goats and sheep where the far east did not, but both areas had access to cattle or cattle-like animals (water buffalo) and pigs (which seem to have been independently domesticated in the Middle East and East Asia).

What gave these regions the edge in starting civilizations was not access to domesticable animals, but access to large grains like wheat and rice that kick-started sedentary farming. Once they had sedentary farming, it was much easier to experiment with taming animals-and even though separated by thousands of miles, these different centers of agriculture domesticated the same animals, which to my mind shows that pigs and cattle are, for whatever reason, preferable to domesticate among Eurasian animals.

There are some animals that seem to have been domesticated independently of a sedentary society, but being a sedentary farmer makes it much easier to domesticate. Agriculture supporting sedentism is why East Asia and the Middle East were centers of domestication, not because of their access to animal species.

 

[Malta]

Though if anything the Americas may have not had a long period of mass agriculture, given the slow spread of corn, but it still had abundant flora which any number of fauna could have lived off of these sources. Natural Resources were already extremely abundant in the Pacific Coast which supported hundreds of thousands to millions of hunter gatherers.

Though I am curious why nomads like the Plains Tribes that pretty much shadowed the millions of Bison never developed the supposed diseases and resistance that domestication seems to offer. Especially given nomadic style interaction between groups would have spread diseases.

 

[Marko]

After trying quite a bit of different animals, just fire rosted without salt one idea came to me "maybe it was all about taste".



I have noticed the idea that pigs have been constantly domesticated. There is evidence for that but there is also evidence that domesticated pigs and wild boars regularly mate, when the pigs are taken to the autumn acorn grazing.


I will have to look around for an interned based reference but a woman at the veterinaty university in Zagreb a few years ago defended hre doctor's thesis that the people of the late Eneolithic Vučedol culture domesticated Deer and bred him to reach sizes of up to 400 kg.

 

[Sven]

Actually, three of the big 5 were pretty widespread outside these areas. Horses, cattle and pigs roamed from Europe to East Asia (although horses had less overlap with major human population centers, being more of a steppe animal).

Okay, that's true: I overstated my argument a bit there.

What gave these regions the edge in starting civilizations was not access to domesticable animals, but access to large grains like wheat and rice that kick-started sedentary farming.

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 Diamondian paradigm makes a whole lot more sense for plants than it does for animals. The human-plant interaction isn't nearly as complex as the human-animal interaction, and the characteristics you look for in a crop are things that could very plausibly be selected for in specific environments.

Also, you tend to get a lot of closely-related species of plants living in close proximity, such as the three or four species of wheat, along with barley and oats, and they can hybridize with other grasses in their region, so it's not surprising that a trait like large seed size would be very common among grasses in one area, and virtually absent in other areas.

EDIT TO ADD: But, for animals, you'd have to have entirely different sets of animals that are distantly related, all somehow converging on the same, unsubstantiated behavioral syndrome in a diversity of habitats, but only on one continent. I just don't buy it. It seems so much more likely that well-documented shifts in human behavior (new tool sets, new hunting tactics, etc.) as we spread out of Africa, set the stage for a different type of societal development to take place.

 

[Sven]

I will have to look around for an interned based reference but a woman at the veterinaty university in Zagreb a few years ago defended hre doctor's thesis that the people of the late Eneolithic Vučedol culture domesticated Deer and bred him to reach sizes of up to 400 kg.

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.

 

[twovultures]

Though I am curious why nomads like the Plains Tribes that pretty much shadowed the millions of Bison never developed the supposed diseases and resistance that domestication seems to offer. Especially given nomadic style interaction between groups would have spread diseases.

It takes way more than following wild animals for diseases to jump to people. You have to be in constant contact with the animals while they are alive to really give a chance for zoonotic diseases to infect you. Even then, it takes time and a dense population for these zoonotic diseases to become crowd diseases. The Plains Indians were not living close enough to buffalo to catch their germs, and even if they were there were few Indians spread over too wide an area to effectively pass on germs to each-other.

As for disease 'resistance', that's controversial. Yes, early exposure to diseases might develop our general immunity in a way that helps us fight off bacteria and viruses, but being immune to diseases means having specific immunity. Europeans died from yellow fever in massive numbers despite having been greatly exposed to viruses as children, because none of the viruses they had been exposed to in Europe gave them immunity to yellow fever.