mojojojo
Gone Fishin'
I have heard some speculate that the Dodo could have been kept as an ornamental bird, the way swans and peacocks are now.
Alternate Domestic Animals
- Thread starter Leistungsfähiger Amerikan
- Start date
I've never understood the Jared Diamond appeal. I bought GG&S a year ago, read half of it, and realized that he hadn't said a damn thing that I hadn't read elsewhere. He may have drawn together a lot of information in an engaging way, but I found nothing original or especially enlightening. The book is still on the floor next to my bed. It's going in my next donation to the local library's resale shop.
Hippos, by the way, are bad candidates for any sort of domestication. They're phenomenally aggressive. I'm not sure about pygmy hippos. But I'd stay away from them just in case.
The Sandman
Banned
Here's a question about the whole "is it domesticable?" thing: how does the existence of cattle mesh with Diamond's theories? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but we're fairly certain that the modern cow was domesticated from the aurochs. Which were both extremely large and extremely mean. Not, you would think, a good candidate for domestication, considering the amount of effort you'd have to put into keeping the damn things under control. I'd think that that would have been on par with domesticating the American Bison in difficulty.
And yet it obviously was done. So being big and nasty isn't necessarily enough to prevent domestication.
If you want a far out domestication strategy, why not have human-planted and managed kelp forests? Aside from the kelp itself, you could make use of sea otters to keep the urchin population down (and for fur, and maybe even companionship) and the local sirenian variant (dugong, Stellar's sea cow, manatee, or whatever) for actual hunting as it grazes on the kelp. Plus any of the fish that live there, and the shellfish.
And yet it obviously was done. So being big and nasty isn't necessarily enough to prevent domestication.
If you want a far out domestication strategy, why not have human-planted and managed kelp forests? Aside from the kelp itself, you could make use of sea otters to keep the urchin population down (and for fur, and maybe even companionship) and the local sirenian variant (dugong, Stellar's sea cow, manatee, or whatever) for actual hunting as it grazes on the kelp. Plus any of the fish that live there, and the shellfish.
the difference is that you can take calves and they will accept you as a dominant leader, because cattle have an ingrain instinct to defer to a herd leader. Bison don't; you can tame individual animals, but they don't really have strongly dominant herd leaders like cattle do. Even if you take a herd of bison calves and try to treat them like cattle, when they become adults, they won't let themselves be dominated... they're willful, moody, and (while generally not that aggressive) will stomp you into the mud if they take a notion to do so... they are also notorious for busting fences if they decide they want to go on the other side of them...
The Sandman
Banned
Did not know that; I suppose that would explain it.
Hmm, how about glyptodonts as a possibility? They might have been interesting.
This does bring up an interesting point to consider regarding having a tamed animal vs. a domesticated one. People have brought up elephants, and if I recall correctly they are considered to be tamed rather than actually domesticated. Someone earlier mentioned Moose cavalry, and I was wondering, would those have been considered tamed moose or actual domesticated moose, by which I mean was there a specific population of moose that was utilized by humans?
elephants are tamed, caught in the wild, because their growth period is so long, it's not worthwhile to breed them (except for zoos)....
I thought that might be the case. Perhaps in addition to that another reason for them having not been domesticated is that they could be tamed far more easily, making any attempt at domestication unnecessary? I mean, if you can take them from the wild and tame them why even bother going through the trouble of breeding them yourself?
The Sandman
Banned
Hmm, moose appear to have a short enough gestation period (8 months or so, with multiple births not uncommon) to be viable.
For another one, what about musk oxen? Have a population of Inuit turn to herding them, and maybe caribou as well.
They only rarely breed in captivity; they need a large range, thus domesticating cheetahs becomes merely very difficult instead of impossible. My wife told me about a story on AOL just a few days ago about a cheetah cub born in zoo...so now it is plausible.
musk oxen also have the problem of not being dominated by a herd leader (which can be transferred to a human)... plus, they have the problem of, when confronted with danger, forming circles around the young (heads and horns out), and darting out to gore and trample enemies; rather inconvenient for would-be herders...
The Sandman
Banned
Odd, I thought that they did have a herd leader, at least in mating season. And the circling thing actually would seem to work rather well, assuming you can get them to not be afraid of the herders first; it means that you can use dogs to herd them.
Bill Cameron
Banned
Jesus H. Christ...
This is precisely the "completely divorced from reality" ideas what I've been posting about.
Planting and managing kelp forests? Want to explain to how Stone Age humans can dive 100m or more to "plant" the kelp that make up those forests?
Bill
The Sandman
Banned
Jesus H. Christ...
This is precisely the "completely divorced from reality" ideas what I've been posting about.
Planting and managing kelp forests? Want to explain to how Stone Age humans can dive 100m or more to "plant" the kelp that make up those forests?
Bill
How deep precisely does the kelp forest have to start? 20-30m is definitely within range of humans, or even 40m. Beyond that it's a bit trickier, but still possible for at least some people.
And as far as the "managing" goes, this is more of a basic "keep the number of sea urchins and other things that destroy kelp down, probably via the sea otter population as well as human fishing".
Bill Cameron
Banned
Don't backpedal.
You explicitly wrote human planted kelp forests.
Maybe those domesticated dolphins can help...
Bill
I'd argue for elephants as a semi-domesticate. They were consistently put to significant economic and military use through the independent invention of at least four societies - Mesopotamia, Punic North Africa, North China and India, with Southeast Asia being a potentially fifth independent semi-domestication.
The general rule is that elephants were captured in the wild, enculturated to humans or with mahouts, and employed in large numbers by humans. Their use may well have been contemporary with or even preceded the domestication of draft animals.
The trouble with elephants is that they live too damned long, 65 years, making for a working lifespan of 20 to 40 years or more. That means that you don't really have a pressing need to continually invest in new elephants. The other problem is that they take so long to grow, 25 years or literally a human generation, that the investment will seem counter-productive.
There's evidence that all 'Elephant using' societies did breed elephants, and in particular, the most successful surviving one in Southeast Asia puts a fair premium and invests a lot of ceremonial and cultural energy into raising elephants.
But the reality is that for the actual economic needs, it was always cheaper to continually harvest wild elephants and semi-domesticate them or integrate them into human society than it was to breed them.
So the problem was that once the wild population gets hunted out or driven off by habitat destruction, then you need to make a significant social investment in breeding them. Unfortunately, their working life is so long that the investment in breeding doesn't make short term sense. Instead, the economics favour faster breeding, faster growing, though shorter lived creatures.
It's possible that Elephants in a historical sense carve out the economic niches and roles that are later filled by other domesticates.
As a result, working elephants quickly decline and vanish from the population within a few generations of the elimination of the wild populations. This happened in Mesopotamia, in north china and in north africa.
It might be theoretically possible to come up with a timeline pod, and circumstances where any or all of these cultures decided to make the investment in elephant breeding, in addition to or as an alternative to other draft animals. In which case, we'd be saying the Elephant is a domesticated animal.
It's worth noting that a number of elephant species co-existed with neolithic man - including presumably potentially faster living dwarf species. These include the mammoths (browsers), mastodons (grazers), the stegodonts of east asia, and the gomphotheres who lasted in South America right up until about 500 CE. Potentially, any or all of them may have been semi-domesticable in the same way that the African or Indian elephants were. But there was no need, in the cultures of the time, for their labour.
This is one of the factors that Diamond overlooks. Not only does the animal need to fulfill a set of requirements (and Diamond's specifics are in a number of particulars questionable), but the human culture has to actually have a viable role for them. And the animal has to be able to survive in the wild in proximity to the human culture, in sufficient numbers for domestication to be a possibility.
The Meso-Americans weren't particularly inept at domestication. The trouble was that all the potentially domesticable species in proximity got hunted out before domestication events could take place.
The general rule is that elephants were captured in the wild, enculturated to humans or with mahouts, and employed in large numbers by humans. Their use may well have been contemporary with or even preceded the domestication of draft animals.
The trouble with elephants is that they live too damned long, 65 years, making for a working lifespan of 20 to 40 years or more. That means that you don't really have a pressing need to continually invest in new elephants. The other problem is that they take so long to grow, 25 years or literally a human generation, that the investment will seem counter-productive.
There's evidence that all 'Elephant using' societies did breed elephants, and in particular, the most successful surviving one in Southeast Asia puts a fair premium and invests a lot of ceremonial and cultural energy into raising elephants.
But the reality is that for the actual economic needs, it was always cheaper to continually harvest wild elephants and semi-domesticate them or integrate them into human society than it was to breed them.
So the problem was that once the wild population gets hunted out or driven off by habitat destruction, then you need to make a significant social investment in breeding them. Unfortunately, their working life is so long that the investment in breeding doesn't make short term sense. Instead, the economics favour faster breeding, faster growing, though shorter lived creatures.
It's possible that Elephants in a historical sense carve out the economic niches and roles that are later filled by other domesticates.
As a result, working elephants quickly decline and vanish from the population within a few generations of the elimination of the wild populations. This happened in Mesopotamia, in north china and in north africa.
It might be theoretically possible to come up with a timeline pod, and circumstances where any or all of these cultures decided to make the investment in elephant breeding, in addition to or as an alternative to other draft animals. In which case, we'd be saying the Elephant is a domesticated animal.
It's worth noting that a number of elephant species co-existed with neolithic man - including presumably potentially faster living dwarf species. These include the mammoths (browsers), mastodons (grazers), the stegodonts of east asia, and the gomphotheres who lasted in South America right up until about 500 CE. Potentially, any or all of them may have been semi-domesticable in the same way that the African or Indian elephants were. But there was no need, in the cultures of the time, for their labour.
This is one of the factors that Diamond overlooks. Not only does the animal need to fulfill a set of requirements (and Diamond's specifics are in a number of particulars questionable), but the human culture has to actually have a viable role for them. And the animal has to be able to survive in the wild in proximity to the human culture, in sufficient numbers for domestication to be a possibility.
The Meso-Americans weren't particularly inept at domestication. The trouble was that all the potentially domesticable species in proximity got hunted out before domestication events could take place.
Don't backpedal.
You explicitly wrote human planted kelp forests.
Maybe those domesticated dolphins can help...
Bill
comment deleted as unnecessary
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The Sandman
Banned
Don't backpedal.
You explicitly wrote human planted kelp forests.
Maybe those domesticated dolphins can help...
Bill
Planted by humans, sure. Managed, well, humans are obviously going to do part of it. Apparently sea urchins are considered by some to be quite tasty.
But you're simply not going to be able to get them all, which is where the otters come in.
Or do you not comprehend the difference between planting a garden and weeding it?