If Quolls were(and you
know I hope they are
), what effect would they have on the native fauna of NZ if taken there?
Very bad. Domesticated quolls would probably run wild and do the same sorts of things to New Zealand's birds as feral cats, stoats, weasels and the like have done to it in OTL. We'd be looking at mass extinctions, really.
Fair enough; just figured it would be cool and hoped it was plausible enough to justify it happening.
Also, again, wondering if Haast's Eagle might have made kangaroos more manageable by possibly hunting them more effectively than dingoes.
I suspect not. Domesticated eagles would be a lot harder to look after than dingos, and wild ones would be seen as competition for kangaroos from human hunters, who'd rather keep them for, well, human consumption.
Any chance of someone trying, even if only as a status symbol a la cheetahs and leopards in ancient Egypt?
It's always possible that this might be tried with quolls. Cheetahs were tamed but not domesticated in Egypt, by the way. (As they were in India.) The problem is that cheetahs really, really don't breed well in captivity. For a female to come into heat, the male has to chase her for quite a long run, several kilometres at least, and she often makes him break off the run, hunt some food for her, then keep going. This means that if you're trying to breed cheetahs, you need to have a rather large area fenced in with lots of food for them to hunt, and the cheetah you're trying to breed is now ten or twenty kilometres away.
Not sure if you've mentioned this already, but will any portions of the Australian crop package have effects on Europe similar to potatoes in OTL?
Yes. Semi-arid areas in the Mediterranean and elsewhere are going to become a lot more productive. So would much of the Great Plains of North America, at least below 45 degrees north. The perennial agriculture will have plants whose roots hold the soil together, which will avoid problems like the Dust Bowl.
Also, is there any possibility of some of the Australian stuff somehow making it across to South America in the pre-Columbian period, or are the links required too long and tenuous for that?
Not in the pre-Columbian period; the transportation period is too long. Sweet potatoes took several centuries to reach the western Pacific from South America, and there's less than two centuries from first contact between the *Aborigines and the Maori to when Columbus is going to land in the West Indies. It's by no means certain that the Maori would keep up contact with Polynesia anyway; long-range navigational skills were gradually lost after settlement in New Zealand. Of course, contact with Australia may mean that they keep up knowledge of how to construct seaworthy craft, but the navigators may learn only how to sail across the Tasman, and lose the other accumulated oral knowledge and tradition needed to navigate across the expanse of the Pacific.
Quolls seem sensible, if they really are like cats in terms of prey choices and social habits; given that Australia IIRC has native rats, the Aborigines will probably need some way of keeping the rodent population away from the food stores.
Quolls may be possible; domesticating small animals is easier than domesticating larger ones. I just haven't looked into it enough to find out whether they are domesticable, and if so, which of the several quoll species would be the most suitable for domestication.
In re the beasts of burden thing, how early might camels show up in this Australia? I could see them having similar effects in Australia to what horses had in the Americas.
Camels and horses are likely to show up not long after European contact. Camels were of course used to explore the desert historically, and the Portuguese and/or the Dutch would probably have access to them. For the agricultural areas of Australia, horses would do just as well, if not better, and would have substantial effects on the cultures there. They wouldn't have quite the same effects as horses in North America, though. In North America, whole cultures abandoned maize-based agriculture in favour of horse-based nomadism where they chased the buffalo (okay, American bison, for the pedantic). This wouldn't work in Australia; perennial agriculture is less labour-intensive than maize, and in any case there's no equivalent to the buffalo. Kangaroos just wouldn't cut it; not numerous enough, not migratory enough, and so forth.
EDIT: A little more farfetched for domestication, but what about koalas? They aren't particularly friendly, and they don't reproduce very fast, but they have the advantage of eating something that is more or less unusable by humans. I can't see them being anything remotely resembling a primary source of protein, but could they provide a bit more variety to the sources of meat that don't have to be actively hunted?
Koalas are rather bad candidates for domestication. Domesticating animals which live primarily in trees is hard enough anyway. Koalas combine this with an extremely aggressive temperament, territorial nature, and
extremely fussy dietary requirements.
Also, with the degree to which the *Aborigine civilization is farming the river systems, would they attempt to domesticate platypi? I don't know if they'd be worth it for meat, but the fur might be useful, and so would the venom of the males if it can be harvested. Maybe they'd become the beavers of *Australia?
Platypuses are temperamental, burrow out of enclosures, and extremely difficult to breed in captivity. (Only a handful have been bred in captivity today). I suspect that they're simply too much trouble to domesticate, although wild ones might be harvested from the improved wetlands.
Well, a quick Google Search seems to suggest that Quolls even in their current non-selectively bred form are perfect pets:
http://www.convictcreations.com/animals/nativepets.html
Interesting article, although it has its own biases. I particularly like the author(s) magical ability to read the minds of the people who oppose them and know exactly what their motivations are.
Well shit, why aren't we keeping them already?
I'm not sure, but I could hazard a guess. Partly because having a pet which can take your finger off with one bite is an interesting exercise, partly because we already have cats to fill that niche (and that kind of inertia is hard to displace), but mostly because there are quite sensible laws against keeping native animals as pets. When you're dealing with a large number of species which are already threatened or endangered, the last thing you want is hundreds of collectors roaming the bush to collect wild ones to keep as exotic pets. (Especially during the early stages of any legalisation, when native pets would instantly command high prices as exotic pets.)
Well.... take it as a sign that both species are largely extinct in modern Egypt....
True, although a large number of species were hunted out of Egypt. I don't think that domestication in itself had much to do with it.
At the risk of a digression, do you mind if I ask why?
I was thinking this too. But actually it seems like Mesoamerica would at least disprove this theory. It seems like has less of an east west axis than further up in north america and yet the olmecs developed earlier than the Haudenosaunee.
Same with the Amazon vs. the Andes, one had more of an east-west axis and yet, the former developed faster and further than the latter.
Unless you have another objection Jared?
Diamond's argument was that having continents with a north-south alignment meant that crops would take longer to spread than they would along an east-west axis. This was supposedly due to time needed to adapt to growing seasons and the like, which meant that time was needed to breed new cultivars of domesticated crops and so on.
The problem with this idea is that it's a load of rubbish. The time taken to spread crops is largely a result of technological level, not whether they're moving north-south or east-west. The time taken for crops to spread north from Mesoamerica into North America was no longer than it took for crops to spread east-west along Eurasia, at the times when both societies were still at a neolithic level of technology. Maize wasn't fully domesticated until around 1500 BC, and from there it spread to the northern reaches of the Mississippi by 2500 years (or less) later. Cassava had been domesticated in Brazil (or maybe Colombia) sometime earlier than that (no-one's quite sure when) and had
already spread to Mesoamerica by the time when maize agriculture really got going.
Now, Eurasian crops were first domesticated in the Middle East by, well, estimates of the dates vary, but by around 8000 BC. By 6500 BC, the first farmers had reached the Aegean. Guess how long it took to spread along the east-west axis to northwestern Europe? About 2500 years... It took even longer to penetrate east into Iran; Mesopotamia had farming by around 7000 BC at the latest, and yet central and eastern Iran, which was so much closer geographically (to the east) didn't get farming until over 3000 years later.
What does make a difference in the spread of crops is geographical barriers, which are best overcome by technological development. Consider that California
never got maize-based agriculture until European contact, even though it would have been suitable there. The problem was this thing called the Rocky Mountains, and the related desert barriers. Maize and other crops were spread to the Mississippi, probably by water, but that didn't help to cross the Rockies. Even when maize spread to the Mississippi, it still didn't go from there across the Rocky Mountains, when this was an east-west spread, where supposedly the varieties of maize being grown along the Mississippi should have adapted to the growing seasons or whatever needed to live there. Note that the reason why agriculture took so long to spread to eastern Iran/Persia was because of geographical barriers (mountains and deserts). Potatoes and sweet potatoes had trouble making it to Mexico not because of a north-south axis, but because there were mountains, jungles and deserts (Atacama) in the way.
For the Americas, remember that Diamond talked about how it was supposedly hard for plants to adapt to different growing seasons at different latitudes. Now, what happened after Europeans showed up and could transport things quickly by water? Within a couple of hundred years, Eurasian
and American crops were being grown across the length and breadth of the Americas. Of course, there are plants which just can't be grown in some latitudes (tropical crops outside of the tropics, for instance), but that's not the same thing. The speed of diffusion of crops wasn't a function of a north-south or east-west axis, but a result of technological levels and whether the crops would grow there at all. It may take plants some time to adapt to different growing latitudes, perhaps, but that wasn't a function of needing thousands of years to do it, or else Europeans wouldn't have been able to spread so many crops so quickly.