Why not, out of curiosity? I don't know much about the elephant bird personally, so I'd like to hear your opinion.
The Southern Cradle: An Alternate History of Africa
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Why not, out of curiosity? I don't know much about the elephant bird personally, so I'd like to hear your opinion.
No one knows much about them really. It's related to cassowaries and emus, both successfully farmed and tamed, though neither particularly tractable. It seems likely the Malagasy would not hunt them or steal their eggs as much if they had brought pigs and chickens. And familiarity with domesticated animals would lead to some attempts to domesticate the elephant bird if it's at all possible.
As for introducing them to the mainland, their diet consists mainly of tropical fruits though they are likely omnivores. Hard to say if they can adapt to a different variety of fruits.
As for introducing them to the mainland, their diet consists mainly of tropical fruits though they are likely omnivores. Hard to say if they can adapt to a different variety of fruits.
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I got the impression that Breadfruit was introduced to Madagascar during the colonial era.
Aha!
Of course that doesn't say WHEN it was introduced to Madagascar.
Aha!
http://eolspecies.lifedesks.org/pages/70032 said:
Of course that doesn't say WHEN it was introduced to Madagascar.
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Neolithic.
I just discovered this interesting and uncommon TL.
Apparently we will have a Neolithic revolution in southeastern Africa earliest and most stable of which would come with the proto Bantu migration, in Otl.
I just discovered this interesting and uncommon TL.
Apparently we will have a Neolithic revolution in southeastern Africa earliest and most stable of which would come with the proto Bantu migration, in Otl.
Yeah, so I am asking how do they do.
It is pretty much incredible that they wont be sank into the sea in mere canoes, and they would have the water and food. Food is still fine, but water?
And they bring animals along with them, and their feed?
I am curious as I thought such open sea travelling can only be done by ships like carracks.
See the edited quote, Nataraj. I can't see the Elephant Bird being a good domesticate either.
Uhm. okay. All right, we don't know a lot about the Aepyornis. They were extinct before Europeans ever encountered them, and I don't think that there's a lot of folklore that described their behaviour and habits.
But my impression, and I could be wrong, is that the Birds were essentially examples of Island giantism, and exhibited a number of typical features:
Absence of principal predators, Madagascar featured a couple of species of crocodiles, the giant fossa (four feet long with tail) and a couple of eagles. None of which would have normally posed a threat to any Aepyornis larger than a chick.
Without significant predation, but with limited habitat, a fast growing/fast breeding creature tends to crash its ecology. So the tendency is to have long lived creatures which grow slowly and reproduce slowly. The creatures live long and largely untroubled lives.
Now, falling out of that, there's not a lot of need to develop a lot of extra 'horsepower.' Basically, its a slow roamer, not a migrator, there may be episodes of sprinting, but that's about it.
It's a forest/jungle dweller, so you're going to look at animals which are moving relatively slowly through confined but relatively resource rich territories.
Now, if you look at the optimum characteristics for domestication, a number of flags come up:
For domesticates, mostly we like fast rapid breeders. Most juvenile animals are just a mouth to feed. You don't necessarily want to spend ten or fifteen years waiting for it to grow big enough to put to use carrying packs, dragging a plow or hauling a cart. Rather, you want something that you're going to get useful labour or ready meat out of within a few years.
You also want domesticates that reproduce quickly. Animals that produce litters are very good return on the investment of keeping them around. If you can't have litters, then you want an animal that can chug out an offspring early (reaches mature reproductive age soon - a year or two or so) and then can reproduce readily, year after year.
I simply doubt that Aepyornis reproduces these characteristics of a desirable domesticate. Maybe they do, but I've never seen any evidence thereof.
There are other characteristics for big domesticates, some of them spurious, some overlooked. You'll hear that fencing is an essential part of domestication, the ability to keep an animal confined. The notion is that an animal that can readily jump fences isn't domesticable... that's sort of nonsense. You'll hear that migrators don't make good domesticates because of their tendency to wander away... also nonsense.
What you want and need from a draft labour domesticate is heart. It has to be an animal that you can actually put to work. That's not just strength, but the endurance to work and keep on working, travelling, carrying, hauling for a large part of the day. An animal that's only good for a fifteen or twenty minute surge of intense activity... and then it needs to rest for a while... not so good.
But where does heart come from? It's a byproduct of your animals lifestyle. Basically, animals which are from niches which involve sustained levels of relatively high activity.... the marathon runners of the animal world, are the best domesticates. You'll get labour out of them. This tends to be animals that maintain or move through very large territories, animals whose lifestyle calls for sustained exertion, or animals with migration capacity. These animals usually exhibit 'surplus labour capacity.' ie, they've got more endurance than their lifestyle usually calls for. Why? Because often, the juveniles need to keep up with the adults, which means that in order to keep up, juveniles need a lot of heart, and they grow to adults with surplus capacity.
So getting to Aepyornis, we have animals which are forest dwellers. Historically, at least among mammals, these don't seem to have a lot of surplus labour capacity. In assessments of animal labour capacity, forest mammals generally seem to have less capacity for labour than equivalent sized plains animals.
Bottom line, I think Aepyornis was probably a poor candidate for useful domestication. Even if it was big enough to ride, you'd probably not get a lot of useful riding out of it - it would tire too fast.
Compare this with Ostrich:
* They reach sexual maturity within two to four years, within the desirable range for domesticates.
* They're prolific breeders - they reproduce several times over a lifetime which can run up to sixty years. Because the mortality rate is 90%, they overproduce eggs. During a breeding season, an ostrich will lay between 2 and 12 eggs. Communal nests may contain between 20 and 60 eggs. The eggs take about 45 days to gestate.
* They're open country creatures, capable of great speeds but also constant movement, and so have established an ability to carry pack weights of up to 20% of body weight. They can temporarily carry riders at 50% of body weight.
There's a number of other qualities - sociability, diet, etc. which seem to weigh in support of Ostriches, but which aren't necessarily or likely found in Aepyornis.
I don't think anyone would claim the Elephant bird would be superior to horses for endurance or pigs for fertility. One should expect however it would have fertility competitive with horses (7 years to maturity) and performance superior to pigs. Among the poor selection available in Madagascar and Southern Africa, the giant bird has a great deal to offer as a farmable animal with a lot of meat, eggs equivalent to 160 chicken eggs, and possibly act as beast of burden.
The elephant for example is a tamed beast of burden that is forest dwelling, takes extremely long to mature, while shedding no feather and laying no eggs. Finally I'm unsure what we know of how long this bird reach full size. The only report we have is a French account saying its careful to lay eggs far from humans.
The elephant for example is a tamed beast of burden that is forest dwelling, takes extremely long to mature, while shedding no feather and laying no eggs. Finally I'm unsure what we know of how long this bird reach full size. The only report we have is a French account saying its careful to lay eggs far from humans.
On what basis? To my recollection, Horses reach sexual maturity as early as 18 months, though typically, they're not considered mature until 3 or 4 (the skeleton may continue to grow for another couple of years). Basically, for most working horses, three to four years is it, which is on the outer end, of most viable domestication.
Pigs reach sexual maturity (estrus) in as little as four months, and are ready to slaughter (fully physically mature) in six or seven months. They reproduce litters of up to eleven piglets.
I can't find any specific literature on the life cycle of Aepyornis but I would be profoundly skeptical that it's anywhere near these.
The question is, how long does it take to get that meat to harvest/slaughter. Remember that keeping the animals around for a prolongued time is an investment. The longer you have to wait, the worst the cost benefit is. Long lived, slow growing animals are a poor investment.
And the eggs are nice, but we can't assume Ostrich level of fertility. Ostrich count on the fact that 90% of their eggs or chicks don't make it, so they lay lots. An Aepyornis has no enemies and they're in sheltered forests, they might only lay one egg a year, or one egg every couple of years.
As for beast of burden, I find that questionable. As I've said, the lifestyle doesn't seem to fit.
But Elephants were not formally domesticated. Instead, the practice was to take or capture wild elephants and tame them. They were very useful full grown and working, but no society made a real investment in actually raising them. It takes 25 years for full maturity - I think that even to get decent work, you'd probably be looking at a 15 year wait
Lacking information, I tend to go with the rules of Island Giantism.
In OTL the Aepyornis coexisted with the Malagsay for well over a millennium. The Malagsay were an agricultural people, but never domesticated the Aepyornis. That doesn't rule it out, but it is suggestive.
This is disputed though.
Some sources say this because the first French travellers heard of it and the first French governor wrote about the bird in 1658; however, no European is credited to have seen any alive. Probably they just heard Malagasy fables about the animal, like they still have about long-vanished fauna like Malagasy hippopotamus and giant lemurs.
There is no proof that elephant birds survived the collapse of the Malagasy megafauna (occured between the 8th and the 10th century) and it's unlikely they did so.
Today many scientists believed that elephant birds were already rare when Austronesians arrived in Madagascar due to the climatical change suffered in the island (droughts that converted wetlands in savanna) during the previous millennium.
So their scarcity and dependence on especific Malagasy wetland ecosystems make them a very unlikely candidate for succesful domestication.
When you think of a canoe, you're probably thinking of a light, single hulled little boat, some little dinghy propelled by paddles, yeah?
The canoes we're talking about being used here aren't much like that. For this event, we'd probably be looking at canoes with two connected hulls, probably some sails, and possibly a float attached to each side to stabilize it (usually used for the single hulled outriggers).
That sort of boat, made with the same techniques and technologies, has been tested and proven capable of repeating the Polynesian voyages across the Pacific Ocean.
One boat such as the ones that brought the Maori to New Zealand could carry as many as forty people and the supplies to sustain them.
As for the animals, they probably weren't expected to last through the entirety of a given voyage, instead being brought along as protein that wouldn't go bad, with strong hopes that they wouldn't have to kill them all or let them all die before landing.
Ja. Just look at the historical voyages of the Polynesians. Those guys were absolutely amazing navigators, among other things.
They covered the entire central Pacific, bringing crops and animals with them (not all animals survived to all islands). They even seem to have reached South America, bringing back sweet potato and quite possibly gourds.
It is certain that sweet potato and gourds came from the Americas. It is just possible that some may have rafted out to the closer Polynesians islands. OT3H, the fact that "kumara", the polynesian name for sweet potato is next to identical to a name used for the same plant by some South American natives is ... highly suggestive.
It's even thought that maybe chickens were introduced to South America, but the initial evidence is not looking quite as convincing on further investigation.
They covered the entire central Pacific, bringing crops and animals with them (not all animals survived to all islands). They even seem to have reached South America, bringing back sweet potato and quite possibly gourds.
It is certain that sweet potato and gourds came from the Americas. It is just possible that some may have rafted out to the closer Polynesians islands. OT3H, the fact that "kumara", the polynesian name for sweet potato is next to identical to a name used for the same plant by some South American natives is ... highly suggestive.
It's even thought that maybe chickens were introduced to South America, but the initial evidence is not looking quite as convincing on further investigation.
I see. Thank you. My thinking is definitely infected by EUIV that there will be attrition whenever you sail in the open sea.
Why would it take so long? I agree that Austronesians could survive a voyage of this length, but if a boat is blown west from Madagascar, the Agulhas current will take it right to South Africa. It seems to me they'd get to the Tugela sooner.
Anyway, you've got my attention and I look forward to seeing what comes next. It will be a few centuries before the Bantu expansion gets that far, and an agricultural Austronesian-Khoikhoi culture will be in a good position to resist them. Southern Africa will end up more diverse, and the Bantu-speaking peoples could also gain from the interaction, as over the long term, both sides will share technology.
Note that the Malagasy are much more primitive than the Bantu that would arrive later (no iron working, for instance), and iOTL, the KhoiSan were NOT pushed out until after Europeans arrived. The Malagasy crop package is probably even less suited for the Cape area than the Bantu package.
Note, too, that the Khoi were pastoralists - and therefore have something to trade the newcomers for their agricultural package.
The Khoi would trade sheep, and possibly cattle for Malagasy pigs, chickens and dogs. Madagascar is closer to Mozambique than the Cape and rice grows quite well there.
Another potential domesticate is the quagga, reputedly less aggressive than zebras. It would probably take too long to breed them for riding. Pulling a cart though would be very doable as zebras have been put to wagons successfully. Where the Khoi or Malagasy would get the idea for the wheel though I have no idea. Perhaps they can use something like a travois.
You're right that the Khoisan hadn't been pushed to the desert at the time of the arrival of the Europeans, but they had been displaced from their previous land further north due to the Bantu migration (though the southern Bantu appear to contain more Khoisan DNA than other Bantu populations). I see the proto-Malagasy either absorbing them eventually or displacing them from at least around the major rivers into more barren land due to their greater numbers and differing ways of using the land. I