Cool Potential Domestications

[mowque]

I love that I came looking for stuff on moose domestication...and I found it only two pages back.

[DValdron]

Originally Posted by mowque

I love that I came looking for stuff on moose domestication...and I found it only two pages back.

There's actually a lot of interesting stuff on Moose domestication in the historical record. Prohibitions in Baltic cities of riding moose. Siberian tribes that rode moose. I think that there's enough evidence to suggest at least an abandoned semi-domestication.

[twovultures]

Originally Posted by DValdron

I would consider a lot of dinosaurs to be comparable to waterfowl. Waterfowl imprint on the first thing they see as their mothers, and show strong attachment.

I suspect that newborn dinosaurs probably imprinted in the same way. So you could probably socialize them much more easily.

I remember reading about the work of paleontologists like Jack Horner, and their discovery of nests and eggs arranged in a way that seemed to suggest that dinosaurs kept nests and took care of their young, at least for a little bit. These ideas were controversial when they came out, but they are more accepted now and show that there is some possibility that the scenario you've described could happen if dinosaurs and humans ever met.

[mowque]

Originally Posted by DValdron

There's actually a lot of interesting stuff on Moose domestication in the historical record. Prohibitions in Baltic cities of riding moose. Siberian tribes that rode moose. I think that there's enough evidence to suggest at least an abandoned semi-domestication.

Point me in any direction to learn about such things? Or is it still in the technical anthropological stage?

[DValdron]

Originally Posted by mowque

Point me in any direction to learn about such things? Or is it still in the technical anthropological stage?

Sorry, I don't have it bookmarked. But google is your friend. You can find a fair amount of this online if you poke around hard enough. It's not organized in any fashion, and it takes a fair bit of digging and inferential reasoning of the sort that historians and anthropologists are often forced to.

I'll give you an example: A baltic city passes a law prohibiting Moose riding in the city limits, because Moose terrify horses.

Why is such a law passed at all? There's no laws in that city against Elephant riding, for instance.

So the inference is that it had to have happened at least once. But if its a one time thing, its not likely that the law would have been enacted. Equally, if there was only a single moose and rider, its not likely they would have gone to the trouble of passing a law. Possible, not likely.

The best inference is that within the region at the time, there were enough instances of Moose riding that the problem needed to be addressed.

Ivan the terrible passed laws prohibiting moose riding on pain of death, and putting tame or domesticated moose to death. Why? Because such riders were a regional challenge. It's a bit of social engineering.

But again, why bother passing such a law at all? If this was just a few scattered instances, it would be dealt with. The fact that a law is passed suggests that there was a social tradition which needed to be stamped out.

Both the Baltic situation and the Russian situation had two common features: Moose vs Horses, with a horse riding dominant society using legislative means to push out Moose riding competitors.

If you dig deep enough, you find enough historical references to moose riders in northern boreal europe and north central boreal asia to at least be able to make a reasonable inference that something is going on consistently.

It's also notable that if you go a bit further north - past the boreal into the subarctic and arctic, you get Reindeer domestication or semi-domestication ranging back between 500 and 3000 years.

The significance of the reindeer habitat is that a horse economy and horses simply can't cope there at all.

But in the Boreal region, it was up until the very late middle ages, a non-horse zone for the most part, and inhabited by browsers and hunter/gatherer/horticulturalists.

So my thinking is that in the late middle ages, a southern economy based on agriculture and horse/cattle grazers came in and pushed out both the semi-domestication of moose and the cultures which were engaged in it.

I'm sure some bright young thing could build a Masters Thesis or a Ph.D. paper out of it.

[mowque]

I will look around for stuff. Very interesting.

BTW, if you Google Moose Domestication, this thread comes up on the first page.

[metastasis_d]

Originally Posted by Sven

I love dinosaur timelines! I tend to be skeptical of any dinosaur domestications, and conservative in proposing them myself: basically, any of the ones that would be awesome, like Triceratops or Velociraptor, would probably be too outlandish.

Never question the rule of cool!

[RGB]

Originally Posted by DValdron

Ivan the terrible passed laws prohibiting moose riding on pain of death, and putting tame or domesticated moose to death. Why? Because such riders were a regional challenge. It's a bit of social engineering.

Probably connection with pagan cults. These moose would be tame, not exactly domestic, but they'd be significant symbolically. The Russian church did sometimes engage in cultural vandalism to get a firmer hold of canonical territory, and the state supported it.

I will have to find some time to go through my collection of Siberian acts to find something about this. Some time.

Moose ARE kind of antisocial, and DO go into dangerous rut.

Reindeer are actually still sometimes ridden short distances by the Evens and Evenks, and widely used as beasts of burden. I kind of think that reindeer are the easiest to a Siberian-Camel (auxillary mount) situation than Moose is, but I'm free to be convinced otherwise.

[Sven]

Originally Posted by DValdron

Actually, I've always considered Dinosaur domestications at least somewhat plausible.... in a crazy ass way.

I would consider a lot of dinosaurs to be comparable to waterfowl. Waterfowl imprint on the first thing they see as their mothers, and show strong attachment.

I suspect that newborn dinosaurs probably imprinted in the same way. So you could probably socialize them much more easily.

Of course, as they matured, they'd get more independent and aggressive. But then again, that's what selective breeding is for. Kill them when they get nasty. The ones that remain docile get to breed more.

I never thought of that. I just saw giant animals with spikes and claws everywhere, teeny-tiny brains, and enormous body masses, and thought: "there's no way!"

My Point of Convergence timeline (linked in my signature) has a few tameable or domesticable dinosaurs, but I either chose small ones (an alvarezsaur as a verminator and a heterodontosaur as a poultry analogue) or had them in an elephant-like pseudo-domestic condition (an elephant-sized sauropod).

[Danbensen]

Originally Posted by Sven

I love dinosaur timelines! I tend to be skeptical of any dinosaur domestications, and conservative in proposing them myself: basically, any of the ones that would be awesome, like Triceratops or Velociraptor, would probably be too outlandish.

Hurray! I'm about two thirds of the way through a book that's all about dinosaur domestication (well not really. It's really about the cost of physical coercion to the winner, and the nature of power and leadership, but it also has dinosaurs!) and I'd love to hear what you have to say on the subject (either on this thread or another).

In my book, time-traveling humans colonized the Late Maastrichtian. Now it's five thousand years later, and they've started to build settled civilizations based on...some kind of crop. I've been vague about it in the book, but so far it's palm starch. In Northern North America, domesticated animals include cat/hawk/dog-like velociraptors, ox/elephant-like triceratopses, and turkey/goat-like chirostenotes. Other potential domesticates would be some big didelphodon-like possum, and some sort of aquaculture with fish. Maybe do something with the giant salamanders?

[Danbensen]

Originally Posted by DValdron

Actually, I've always considered Dinosaur domestications at least somewhat plausible.... in a crazy ass way.

That's the theory I'm going with.
As per my wife's instruction, my female protagonist raises a baby triceratops.

[Danbensen]

Originally Posted by twovultures

I remember reading about the work of paleontologists like Jack Horner, and their discovery of nests and eggs arranged in a way that seemed to suggest that dinosaurs kept nests and took care of their young, at least for a little bit. These ideas were controversial when they came out, but they are more accepted now and show that there is some possibility that the scenario you've described could happen if dinosaurs and humans ever met.

Indeed, although the consensus I'm getting from the OTHER web resources (the dinosaur mailing list and the hell creek forum) seems to be that most dinosaur young were precocial and didn't need much care. The evidence or this is large clutch sizes (R-selection) and reletively well-developed hatchlings. Something like crocodiles, is the picture I'm getting.

[altwere]

It probably depends on the dino. There seems to be evidence that among some of the Hadrosaurs such as Maiasaur that they needed some nest time

[wietze]

wasn't the thought currently moving to the idea that the later dinosaurs are essentially birds? So if birds can be domesticated, then certain kinds of dinos can also.

Now if we only found a way to domesticate politicians LOL
and maybe jackalopes

[ArKhan]

Selectivly breed bees that won't sting their human keepers, see them as a part of their hive, and actively give honey to them by stacking neat little piles of honeycomb outside their hives as offerings. In other words, truly domesticated bees.

[Danbensen]

Originally Posted by ArKhan

Selectivly breed bees that won't sting their human keepers, see them as a part of their hive, and actively give honey to them by stacking neat little piles of honeycomb outside their hives as offerings. In other words, truly domesticated bees.

Or, even better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingless_bee

[Podveleska Utoka]

All animals that could have been of any use to man have been domesticated to be honest. We domesticated wolves, ozelots, falcons, owls, eagles, hens, wild european cows and bulls, boars, hell even bears are used for bear dancing in some places of the world, elephants as well as any other animal that has enough brain to know its master and to learn to do a certain task

[Sven]

Originally Posted by Podveleska Utoka

All animals that could have been of any use to man have been domesticated to be honest.

I think this idea is complete bullshit.

Consider these observations: in the Old World, the first domestication was the dog, maybe 30,000 years ago. A second wave of domestications happened somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 years ago (cow, sheep, goat, pig, cat, chicken). But, horses and camels weren't domesticated until about 6000 years ago, and both were probably only domesticated one time.

In the 4000 years between domestication of the cow and domestication of the horse, dozens (probably hundreds) of human tribes had the opportunity to domesticate the horse, but none of them did, despite the following facts:

1. Horses had probably been the single most common prey item of human hunter-gatherers since they first arrived in Eurasia.
2. Horses are clearly an extremely useful domesticate, having been used for meat, milk, hide and transportation.
3. Horses had a wide geographical range, meaning that a wide range of cultural contexts under which domestication might have occurred was present, presumably increasing the odds of domestication through a sampling effect.

If a highly useful and highly suitable animal like the horse can go for 4000 years without being domesticated, despite hundreds of opportunities to domesticate it, then we have to consider one of two possibilities:

1. Suitability for domestication is not always innate, and, at least in some cases, takes a very long time to evolve in an animal population.
2. Something other than the innate suitability of an animal determines whether it can and will be domesticated (perhaps technological development or societal/cultural dynamics).

Neither one of these options is consistent with the Diamondian "domesticability" paradigm, wherein a simple analysis of a wild animal's behavior and ecology justifies absolute statements about the animal's potential for domestication. In fact, literally every one of the behavioral characteristics Diamond proposes has precedent against it: cats are solitary, rabbits are territorial, horses don't have ordered social hierarchies, geese are aggressive, silkworms have a very narrow diet range and chickens are prone to panic. If all the determinants of domesticability have exceptions, then surely they don't justify universal statements.

And what about turkeys (domesticated < 2000 years ago) and rabbits (< 1500 years ago)? They went over 8000 years from the time when domestication became a societal phenomenon before they were domesticated. If perfectly domesticable animals can go 8000 years without being domesticated, then surely chance alone would suggest that some perfectly suitable animals would go for 10,000 years, right?

[RGB]

Originally Posted by Sven

I think this idea is complete bullshit.

Consider these observations: in the Old World, the first domestication was the dog, maybe 30,000 years ago. A second wave of domestications happened somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 years ago (cow, sheep, goat, pig, cat, chicken). But, horses and camels weren't domesticated until about 6000 years ago, and both were probably only domesticated one time.

In the 4000 years between domestication of the cow and domestication of the horse, dozens (probably hundreds) of human tribes had the opportunity to domesticate the horse, but none of them did, despite the following facts:

1. Horses had probably been the single most common prey item of human hunter-gatherers since they first arrived in Eurasia.
2. Horses are clearly an extremely useful domesticate, having been used for meat, milk, hide and transportation.
3. Horses had a wide geographical range, meaning that a wide range of cultural contexts under which domestication might have occurred was present, presumably increasing the odds of domestication through a sampling effect.

If a highly useful and highly suitable animal like the horse can go for 4000 years without being domesticated, despite hundreds of opportunities to domesticate it, then we have to consider one of two possibilities:

1. Suitability for domestication is not always innate, and, at least in some cases, takes a very long time to evolve in an animal population.
2. Something other than the innate suitability of an animal determines whether it can and will be domesticated (perhaps technological development or societal/cultural dynamics).

Neither one of these options is consistent with the Diamondian "domesticability" paradigm, wherein a simple analysis of a wild animal's behavior and ecology justifies absolute statements about the animal's potential for domestication. In fact, literally every one of the behavioral characteristics Diamond proposes has precedent against it: cats are solitary, rabbits are territorial, horses don't have ordered social hierarchies, geese are aggressive, silkworms have a very narrow diet range and chickens are prone to panic. If all the determinants of domesticability have exceptions, then surely they don't justify universal statements.

And what about turkeys (domesticated < 2000 years ago) and rabbits (< 1500 years ago)? They went over 8000 years from the time when domestication became a societal phenomenon before they were domesticated. If perfectly domesticable animals can go 8000 years without being domesticated, then surely chance alone would suggest that some perfectly suitable animals would go for 10,000 years, right?

Novosibirsk institute domesticated the fox in a few generations, and it could have easily replaced smaller dogs or cats if someone thought of it earlie (say 2-3 K years ago).

So yes, definitely more animals could have been domesticated.

[Sven]

Originally Posted by RGB

Novosibirsk institute domesticated the fox in a few generations, and it could have easily replaced smaller dogs or cats if someone thought of it earlie (say 2-3 K years ago).

So yes, definitely more animals could have been domesticated.

And one of the most interesting questions to ask, as far as alternate domestication is concerned, is, "which societal, cultural, ecological and technological contexts would have resulted in an entirely different barnyard?"