"Hobbits" In Sardinia

Modern studies show that chimpanzees average around twice as strong pound for pound as modern humans. If the Sardinia hobbits were on the chimp side of the set of mutations that made us weaker, an 80 pound "hobbit" would be as strong as a 160 pound man--and that's before ten thousand years of selective breeding for the 'hobbits'. He wouldn't be able to run as far, a fact that plays a role at one point in the novel.

More relevantly, most of what I've seen regarding Neanderthal musculature suggests the same.
 
I'm not sure about security pixies and a bunch of that other stuff.

If animals are too intelligent, they probably can't be domesticated very well. If pixies are bright enough to wander around loose and to work security, they are too bright to be controlled effectively, imho. Dogs are probably at a sweet spot. But if the *mediterranean humans have developed techniques adequate to domesticate creatures with near-human intelligence, the same techniques would probably work to some extent on regular humans. Human slavery and social control in general would probably be much more effective than OTL. Which would cause vast, vast quantities of social change (none of it desirable).

Agreed.

If pixies are on the chimp side of the muscular split, they are probably too aggressive to be domesticated. My suspicion is that the greater density of musculature is closely connected to greater aggressiveness and diminished sociability.

Not really, look at gorillas. Easily the strongest primate, extremely docile animals.

Finally, if pixie breeds are aggressive enough to work security, can they really be tame enough to be domesticated? I have my doubts. OTL, very aggressive dog breeds are hard to control and require a lot of specialized techniques--plus their aggression is managed using pack and territorial modules that don't seem to exist in humanoids--and these dog breeds are less dangerous than armed near-human intelligences with super strength.

Could hominids be bred for docility? Certainly. For loyalty? I don't know.
 
I don't think these arguments work. I don't think you can decide to have it all--intelligence and docility and aggression when you want it, and so on. And even if you could, dogs aren't humanoids. Some of the reasons dogs can be controlled or at least limited don't apply to humanoids. Wolfpacks are not the same as chimp troops or homo sapiens bands.

But even given all that, you don't have a plausible route to domestication. Are pixies tasty? Are they good scavengers whose keen noses complements human senses?

I don't want to rain on your parade. If you're just having fun with a semi-plausible ATL, go for it. But if you're offering this as a serious althistory speculation, I can't buy it.

A wolf is plenty smart enough and powerful enough to be dangerous. The key to domesticating them was to select for individuals who became sexually mature but remained socially immature--essentially grown-up puppies that are less likely to challenge their master for the alpha role. The key is to do that while still retaining aggressiveness and strength. Not easy with dogs. Not easy with "hobbits", but I don't consider it impossible or even harder than with dogs. The key isn't intelligence. It's the instinct for dominance.


Ability to domesticate regular humans would indeed be a very bad thing. Actually domesticating these semi-humans also turns out to be very bad also. The difference is in the ability to control breeding and the shorter generations of the semi-humans.



My understanding is that our wimpy musculature is an adaptation that made our ancestors better at endurance hunting--basically chasing an animal with a team of hunters until it became exhausted. If the strength was linked to aggressiveness it wouldn't occur in the laid-back pygmy chimps, and it does.

The key thing is breeding the drive to become alpha out of them without breeding out the willingness to defend those they perceive as being in their social group. Tame wolves are dangerous because they'll eventually try to become alpha. Breeds with a lot of wolf in them are less dangerous, but still somewhat dangerous. Samoyeds will challenge you unless you keep them busy and tired, for example.

In dogs, ironically, little breeds are far more likely to attack because there aren't the strict controls to keep aggressive animals from breeding.
 
Could hominids be bred for docility? Certainly. For loyalty? I don't know.

I'm not sure whether they could be bred at all in the standard way! Breeding dogs is easy because they have more than one offspring per pregnancy, they can have offspring rather often, and their offspring matures fast. Does any of those apply to the hobbits? A single generation would be much smaller, giving much less individuals to select from, and would span a longer time until reproduction.

And that's ignoring the fact that the more intelligent they are, the more likely it is that they resist the breeding ideas somehow.
 
I'm not sure whether they could be bred at all in the standard way! Breeding dogs is easy because they have more than one offspring per pregnancy, they can have offspring rather often, and their offspring matures fast. Does any of those apply to the hobbits? A single generation would be much smaller, giving much less individuals to select from, and would span a longer time until reproduction.

And that's ignoring the fact that the more intelligent they are, the more likely it is that they resist the breeding ideas somehow.

Or some other part of being slaves.
 
I don't think these arguments work. I don't think you can decide to have it all--intelligence and docility and aggression when you want it, and so on. And even if you could, dogs aren't humanoids. Some of the reasons dogs can be controlled or at least limited don't apply to humanoids. Wolfpacks are not the same as chimp troops or homo sapiens bands.
My main argument is that domestication (of wolves and speculatively of "hobbits") is essentially a matter of selecting for individuals that don't socially mature to the point of trying to become dominant in their social group. In human terms it is the equivalent of keeping them at the emotional equivalent of a pliant seven to nine year-old, eager to please their parents (and, yes, I know that all kids in that age group aren't pliant, but a lot of them are). Young chimps (up to age three or four) are pliant and trainable too. A lot of zoos have them doing all kinds of tricks. The problem is that as they grow older they mature socially and try to dominate the humans around them. That's why you rarely see adult chimps in animal acts.

Granted, a wolf-pack is not structurally the same as a chimp troop or a band of humans, but all three species do have a period of "childhood" where they accept direction from and cooperate with more experienced individuals. Freeze them there socially, and they can be controlled.

But even given all that, you don't have a plausible route to domestication. Are pixies tasty? Are they good scavengers whose keen noses complements human senses?

The route to domestication or slavery (and this is kind of a hybrid of the two) would be essentially the same as that for human slaves. There are routine thankless jobs in any society that people would prefer that someone else do. The difference is that the semi-human slaves can't rise above their station to play an independent role in society and can't interbreed to become part of the dominant group.

I don't want to rain on your parade. If you're just having fun with a semi-plausible ATL, go for it. But if you're offering this as a serious althistory speculation, I can't buy it.
It seems surprisingly plausible to me in basic outline, though it isn't the most likely result of Neolithic farmers encountering semi-humans. At the same time, I'm not going to insist that you buy every aspect of it. It's a timeline for a work of fiction and in fiction an author has to look at what is entertaining as well as what is plausible. I'm enough of an alternate history purist to avoid things that I'm sure are implausible, but if I have to choose between a really dull and difficult to explain alternative and one that is slightly less likely but far more entertaining and that avoids a huge info-dump, I'll go with the slightly less likely one.
 
I'm not sure whether they could be bred at all in the standard way! Breeding dogs is easy because they have more than one offspring per pregnancy, they can have offspring rather often, and their offspring matures fast. Does any of those apply to the hobbits? A single generation would be much smaller, giving much less individuals to select from, and would span a longer time until reproduction.

And that's ignoring the fact that the more intelligent they are, the more likely it is that they resist the breeding ideas somehow.

I agree that breeding semi-humans would take longer and be more difficult than breeding dogs. Wolves reach sexual maturity at two to four years, dogs considerably younger--under a year in some cases. Chimps are sexually mature at 8-10 years, with a few outliers at 7. Figure at least two times as long per generation for hobbits initially, plus the larger litter to choose from for dogs. I suspect that selective breeding would select for earlier sexual maturity in hobbits just like it did in dogs, so figure hobbits eventually would eventually be breeding at four or five years.

As to resisting breeding ideas, if you're talking about breeding with mates other than the ones the human masters want, then yep. That will happen. It happens with dogs too, and if you've ever been around a female dog in heat you'll know that male dogs suddenly show an amazingly ingenious side when they're motivated that way, discovering how to turn door knobs and other things they wouldn't ordinarily do.
 
As to resisting breeding ideas, if you're talking about breeding with mates other than the ones the human masters want, then yep. That will happen. It happens with dogs too, and if you've ever been around a female dog in heat you'll know that male dogs suddenly show an amazingly ingenious side when they're motivated that way, discovering how to turn door knobs and other things they wouldn't ordinarily do.

With hobbits that problem would be even greater, and hobbits should be able to hide any conception by unintended mates much easier. That leaves you with a much smaller number of offspring to select from, spanning a much larger time period, and with a much higher number of "failures" in it.

Another problem: how long will it take to find out whether a new "breed" is "successful"? You want good slaves, then you'd have to wait until they can work as slaves and prove their skills as well as their character. Even if they mature biologically at the age of five, I highly doubt that they would already be fully educated slaves. So you're mating hobbits before you know whether they develop as planned. Not to mention the fact that humans can change...

Frankly, I don't see how you can have a successful selective breeding program going on under these circumstances.


What about something else: horses and donkeys can interbreed, and the hybrids have distinct traits. So what if your story allows for human-hobbit hybrids? Size of humans but hobbit's size-strength relation? Would give you two subspecies for your story, and if the hybrids are sterile, both the human and the hobbit populations could survive indefinitely as separate species. Just an idea though...
 
At the same time, I'm not going to insist that you buy every aspect of it. It's a timeline for a work of fiction and in fiction an author has to look at what is entertaining as well as what is plausible. I'm enough of an alternate history purist to avoid things that I'm sure are implausible, but if I have to choose between a really dull and difficult to explain alternative and one that is slightly less likely but far more entertaining and that avoids a huge info-dump, I'll go with the slightly less likely one.

Fair enough.
 
My field of expertise being the obvious...even if there is some scientific justification, you have to persuade the OTL reader that so much smaller can be so much stronger. They does come across more as fantasy dwarves.

Re dogs. May I recommend John Bradshaw's 'In Defence of Dogs'?

The best of luck with your book.
 
My main argument is that domestication (of wolves and speculatively of "hobbits") is essentially a matter of selecting for individuals that don't socially mature to the point of trying to become dominant in their social group. In human terms it is the equivalent of keeping them at the emotional equivalent of a pliant seven to nine year-old, eager to please their parents (and, yes, I know that all kids in that age group aren't pliant, but a lot of them are). Young chimps (up to age three or four) are pliant and trainable too. A lot of zoos have them doing all kinds of tricks. The problem is that as they grow older they mature socially and try to dominate the humans around them. That's why you rarely see adult chimps in animal acts.

Granted, a wolf-pack is not structurally the same as a chimp troop or a band of humans, but all three species do have a period of "childhood" where they accept direction from and cooperate with more experienced individuals. Freeze them there socially, and they can be controlled.

The route to domestication or slavery (and this is kind of a hybrid of the two) would be essentially the same as that for human slaves. There are routine thankless jobs in any society that people would prefer that someone else do. The difference is that the semi-human slaves can't rise above their station to play an independent role in society and can't interbreed to become part of the dominant group.

I think you're coming at it in very general terms, when the core idea - hominid domestication - is a pretty safe bet. As the Russians have shown fairly definitively, domestication in (at least) placentals appears to involve a single set of genetic triggers. Once activated - and they are activated by the easy expedient of eliminating the most aggressive individual every generation for a few generations - the result is remarkably consistent across very different species. The genes can take a long time to reach full expression in the entire population (thirty generations, as a ballpark figure), but it will happen. It would have happened historically except that for every male slave killed a female one would end up pregnant by her owner. And that slavery is difficult to maintain on a scale of centuries.

Generation time is a justifiable objection, but there are ways around it. Human generation time is 15 years at the longest, and arguably could be more like 13. Island species tend to go a little slower, but earlier hominids tended to go faster, so ten year generations are not unreasonable. To get them domesticated, that and the lack of cross breeding is more than enough. Assuming humans start sometime around 4000 BC, they should be more than ready as a domesticate when the "Romans" turn up.

The only part I'd have a big objection to is the timing - a Rome that appears to be no later than 500 "AD." So far as I know, in that period it was very unusual to see multiple breeds of the same species in the same place. There were many breeds, but they were localized breeds - the breed of a particular region. In a very real way, distance was the original method used for preventing strains from being interbred. Once people in an area decided what a cow should ideally look like, that naturally and gradually became the way they looked. It was only much later that I'm aware of European societies having multiple types of everything, and even then it was mostly a case of importing breeds as much as creating new ones locally.

So I don't think there's anything wrong with your vision for the species, per se. But for myself I'd need to assume their presence in multiple regions for five centuries at minimum, and probably more like a millenium, to allow breeds to diverge enough that they could be traded. There's every reason to believe that the "ideal hobbit" would differ place to place - albinos perhaps in northern Europe or Japan. It's just a matter of time.

When is this "Rome" they are visiting? If it's circa 1500, that's simple enough, but I'd have to stick with the naysayers if the Romans have fifteen kinds of pixie at a time they didn't have four breeds of goat.
 
Generation time is a justifiable objection, but there are ways around it. Human generation time is 15 years at the longest, and arguably could be more like 13. Island species tend to go a little slower, but earlier hominids tended to go faster, so ten year generations are not unreasonable. To get them domesticated, that and the lack of cross breeding is more than enough. Assuming humans start sometime around 4000 BC, they should be more than ready as a domesticate when the "Romans" turn up.

The only part I'd have a big objection to is the timing - a Rome that appears to be no later than 500 "AD." So far as I know, in that period it was very unusual to see multiple breeds of the same species in the same place. There were many breeds, but they were localized breeds - the breed of a particular region. In a very real way, distance was the original method used for preventing strains from being interbred. Once people in an area decided what a cow should ideally look like, that naturally and gradually became the way they looked. It was only much later that I'm aware of European societies having multiple types of everything, and even then it was mostly a case of importing breeds as much as creating new ones locally.

So I don't think there's anything wrong with your vision for the species, per se. But for myself I'd need to assume their presence in multiple regions for five centuries at minimum, and probably more like a millenium, to allow breeds to diverge enough that they could be traded. There's every reason to believe that the "ideal hobbit" would differ place to place - albinos perhaps in northern Europe or Japan. It's just a matter of time.

When is this "Rome" they are visiting? If it's circa 1500, that's simple enough, but I'd have to stick with the naysayers if the Romans have fifteen kinds of pixie at a time they didn't have four breeds of goat.

It's set in near future--somewhere in the 2012-2020 range, both in our reality and in the alternate one. Rome has the feel of pre-500 AD, which is one of the mysteries set up in the novel, and hopefully explained adequately.
 
Are you going to have feral ones?

I don't specify in the novel. I'm not totally against the idea, and I could see individual runaways living in out-of-the-way places, but realistically it would take special circumstances for a self-sustaining population to establish itself. If i can figure out how to make a sustained feral population happen it would be cool.
 
Hobbit mounted dwarf elephantry?

Sardinia did have a dwarf mammoth about four and a half feet tall at the shoulders, but as cool as the idea of dwarf elephant cavalry is I think I'm already asking for enough suspension of disbelief already.
 
Another aspect of the Roman empire rebuilding itself around the "hobbits" and then stagnating is that Europeans don't come to the New World the same way and at the same time. I have the New World continuing to develop with little input from Europe or Asia. I don't specify whether the alternate timeline develops a group equivalent to the Vikings and am currently agnostic about that, but other than some Polynesian contacts I have the New World developing in isolation.

That doesn't mean that the New World develops exactly the same way it did historically. It's arguable whether changes in the interior of Sardinia would lead to widespread indirect butterflies, but when those changes spread all over Europe, Asia and parts of Africa they would almost certainly have indirect impacts on the New World. North America would begin to diverge genetically and in subtle cultural traits by 100 AD if not sooner. I figure that by 1492 the alternate history New World would have essentially all different players genetically compared to our timeline New World, though they would be culturally close to identical. Different actors, very close to the same play.

After 1492, the two timeline New Worlds would quickly diverge, with the Indians continuing their interrupted trajectory in the alternate timeline. The Aztecs or a near equivalent would rise a little further, then eventually fall, replaced by another wave of semi-nomads filtering in from the north. Mound-builders in North America would fall and rise again. Iroquois towns would gradually morph into small cities, their wooden walls switching over to stone. Lots of stuff going on there, and quite a bit of the action takes place in alternate history North America.
 
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