Huehuecoyotl
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The Pounding of Hooves
The Beginnings of Columbian Domestication
The Beginnings of Columbian Domestication
On every continent and in every age, human societies have been profoundly impacted by domestication. It almost seems to come naturally to human beings to bend their environment to their wishes, and perhaps the most dramatic example of this is the subjugation of various species of animal, plant, and even fungus to suit human needs. The process of domestication would arise on nearly every continent, and would dramatically shape the destinies of mankind.
Hesperidia, it seems, began with somewhat of a disadvantage.
When the first humans entered Columbia from Eurasia between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, the only domesticated animal they brought with them was the dog (Canis lupis familiaris). A steadfast companion of the hunter-gatherer since time immemorial, as well as a source of food among other things, the dog would nevertheless fail to become a staple of agriculture among the settled societies of Columbia.
The Siberian husky, which likely resembles the forms of domesticated dog first brought to Columbia.
Upon the arrival of the first proto-Columbians, the Americas teemed with dozens of species of mammalian megafauna [1], from saber-toothed cats and mastodon, to colossal armadillos and giant ground sloths. With meat in such great abundance, hunting was for some thousands of years simply the most effective means of survival in the hemisphere. However, as the Ice Age drew to a close, the megafauna of Hesperidia began to die off. It seems likely that some combination of human predation and the world's changing climate doomed most of these creatures to extinction.
Proto-Columbians stalk a glyptodont, a colossal relation of the modern armadillo.
Whatever the ultimate reason for the die-off, by 8000 BCE, only a few species of megafauna remained in the hemisphere, eliminating many potential domesticates from the pool of candidates.
As the tried-and-true survival method of big game hunting died out in Hesperidia, proto-Columbians were forced to make the transition to small-game hunting and other subsistence methods in their stead. It is at this time, about 8000 BCE, that the Proto-Columbian Period ends, and the Archaic Period begins.
The Archaic Period would be marked both by the first complex human societies in Columbia, as well as the first large-scale cultivation of domesticated plants. In Nuuyoo [2], often referred to as the "Cradle of Agriculture" of the continent, this process would begin the earliest. Squash was an early domesticate of the Nuuyooi peoples. Squashes are a family of low-lying, gourd-like plants of the genus Cucurbita, and in their numerous varieties provided an important source of nutrition for the earliest Columbian farmers. Squashes would come to be cultivated independently in the eastern woodlands of the continent, but this separate domestication of the plant came perhaps six thousand years later.
Squash.
Maize would be the next arrival in the Nuuyooi diet. We should not be misled by the large and fruitful ears of modern maize when considering the domestication of the plant; the wild form of maize is a grass called teosinte, whose own cobs are aggravatingly small. The persistence of the people of archaic Nuuyoo in making the plant useful for cultivation must be admired.
Teosinte.
The first true domestication of what we can call maize comes from south-central Nuuyoo at around 5500 BCE, and it rapidly grew to become the staple crop of the peoples of Isthmocolumbia. Populations throughout the entire region exploded as the cultivation of the plant spread, and the rise of agriculture in the region only accelerated as plants like the chili, avocados, cassava (an arrival from Madeira, it seems), and dozens of others joined maize and squashes as part of the Isthmocolumbian agricultural package.
Past the Tuuwaya Desert [3] in Petsiroò, the agricultural situation was very different. Here, plant cultivation was very limited until the introduction of maize from Isthmocolumbia, and although the ancient Petsiroi peoples probably experimented with wild chenopods and squashes, the importance of these cultivated plants was marginal, in part due to the dryer climate of the region than was found to the south. Hunter-gatherer societies were still predominant when, around 5000 BCE, a new and more reliable source of food began to rise to their attention.
Since its survival by a hair's breadth at the close of the Pleistocene, the uurung's population had been slowly recovering, and by 5500 BCE had recovered to the levels of the Ice Age. Certainly human hunting of the animals had continued in this period, but it was only at this time that human societies began to take a serious interest in harvesting uurung meat.
Even fairly early in the Archaic Period, the wild true uurung (Hemiauchenia macrocephala petsiroensis) was prized for both its meat and its wool. Its fluffy pelage, while not yet as long or as thick as that of some of its domesticated descendants or its cousin the alpaca, was still useful to the people of the mountains and the foothills of the Alinta Mountains. Even in the lowlands and deserts, so hot during the day, the nights at certain times of year could be fairly cold. It was common practice, every two years or so, to drive herds of the animals into funnel-shaped corrals or mountain gorges, cut off their fur, and then set them free to be shorn again another day.
To a lesser extent, hunters sought out the preferred grazing places of the uurung, taking care to slaughter only as many as they needed to eat, and leaving the rest to keep the population growing. By 4000 BCE, semi-nomadic settlements had gained the habit of settling down near these areas of high uurung population density, and soon it became common practice to capture and tame crias to be raised close to home, ultimately to be slaughtered once they reached adulthood. Another 500 years or so passed until entire small herds were being tamed in this fashion, and true domestication of the uurung began in earnest.
It is thus around 3500 BCE that the uurung was domesticated in Columbia for the first time, roughly in the same period as the camel in Arabia and the glama in Madeira. In the chilly mountains and foothills of the Duuye Range [4], human settlements blossomed into a new period of growth as corrals of domesticated uurung sprung up all around the highlands. Due in part to the climate, which was hospitable for the animals, and due to the displacement of hunter-gatherer groups by the increasingly more populous uurung-herders, the range of uurung domestication spread rapidly up the length of the Alinta Mountains. By 2200 BCE, domesticated uurung were grazing near the shores of the Great Bitter Lake [5], and by 1400 BCE had reached the Tuuwaya Desert and the eastern end of the Nehwian Mountains [6].
Interestingly enough, a fluke of ecology would give the first uurung-herders of Petsiroò an unexpected tag-along.
Part of the population growth of the uurung after the end of the Ice Age was owed to the extinction of almost all of the large carnivores that preyed on the uurung, such as the American lion and Smilodon. Although crias could still fall victim to surprise attacks from mountain lions or wolves, adult uurung no longer had any natural enemies. Most Columbian predators soon learned to avoid uurung herds, as an angered adult uurung is fully capable of killing even the most persistent of carnivores, owing to its considerable size.
Another large ungulate was found in the true uurung's range - the bighorn sheep, Ovis canadiensis canadiensis. Although not terribly flighty, and somewhat social animals, bighorn sheep (who share the same genus as the mouflon, the ancestor of the Eurasian sheep) have a fairly poorly-crystallized social hierarchy. Every mating season, competing males assert their dominance in their famous head-butting matches, but there is no such thing in a bighorn herd as a dominant male. If it weren't for the species' unique relationship with the uurung, this obstacle may very well have prevented the domestication of the sheep in Columbia.
While sporting a formidable rack of horns, the bighorn sheep is small enough not to enjoy the same lack of serious predators as the uurung. Bighorn lambs are especially vulnerable, but even adult rams aren't entirely immune. Bighorn sheep herds have since learned to stick near uurung herds, often intermingling directly during the wetter seasons when food is at its most plentiful. Thus, when domesticated herds of uurung began to make their home in or near human settlements, the sheep, who had begun to treat the camelids almost as leaders of the herd, followed after them.
By 1400 BCE, the Columbian sheep joined the uurung as the second large, mammalian domesticate of Columbia, and the third (or fourth) of Hesperidia.
Past the Tuuwaya Desert again, domestication came more slowly. The need to harvest uurung meat didn't arise as early as it did in Petsiroò, as Nuuyoo had a well-established set of crops which fed its population with general reliability. In fact, it was these crops that would ultimately lead to the independent domestication of the uurung in Nuuyoo, as the abundant new plant matter in the fields of the region proved appealing to juvenile paixaay. Although initially it was more common simply to kill the intrusive uurung for their meat, later on a process of capturing and taming similar to that in Petsiroò would catch on. By around 3000 BCE, a half of a millennium after the true uurung, the paixaay joined its cousin among the ranks of Columbian domesticates.
Domestication of the paixaay spread more slowly, but by 1400 CE, it had spread into all but the most humid areas of Nuuyoo, and was expanding in the direction of the Tuuwaya. Here, as trade routes converged and the two breeds of uurung met, the future of Hemiauchenia and Columbian society would change forever...
The spread of the twin breeds of domesticated uurung, as of 1400 BCE at the beginning of the Great Columbian Synthesis.
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[1] - That is, any animal over a hundred pounds in weight. Some megafauna survived the extinction, of course, such as bison, pronghorn antelopes, bears, moose... and, of course, uurung and human beings.
[2] - The Mexican portions of what we'd identify as Mesoamerica, sans the Yucatan.
[3] - A general term for the series of deserts separating the American Southwest and Mesoamerica.
[4] - The Sangre de Cristo Range.
[5] - The Great Salt Lake; not to be confused with the OTL Egyptian lake of the same name, which will come to be called something else ITTL.
[6] - The Sierra Nevada.
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I don't have any substantive comments to make owing to my general unfamiliarity with American prehistory and domestication, but on the whole it was an excellent update with very good writing.