WI The Horse had never died out in the America

Llamas were domesticated in Peru by 3500 BCE. I would think that it would be sometime after this point where the Amerindians in North America are able to domesticate the horse plausibly, if not much, much later (say, 2000 BCE when corn began to be developed in Mesoamerica).


Hnau,

That's too late. Horses were extinct in the Americas by ~10,000 BCE.


Bill
 
Domoviye,

Please believe me when I say I'm not "angry" or "upset" and haven't been in any my posts to this thread. Truely.
Fair enough.


Not "wrong" per se. People have quibbles about some of his more grander conclusions. The basic stuff in the book is generally agreed to be correct. Indeed, most of the basics he discusses were published well before in academic papers and books like Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism" from 1986. Diamond simply wrote a more "popular" and "accessible" book on a topic academics had been discussing for decades.
He missed several dozen domesticated or semi-domesticated plants in North and South America which I consider a mistake. But most of the other quibbles about his theories are just that quibbles.


There's no real need to domesticate bison because our technology allows us to merely pen them instead. Domestication efforts have been attempted since the colonial period however, bison once ranged east of the Mississippi too.
Exactly, they still can't be domesticated despite our technology so they're merely kept captive and "ranched" instead.
And before our modern technology, people could just follow the massive herds and shoot them. The first real ranching practices started in the early 1900's, and intensive ranching started in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Even with this many ranchers are content with leaving their herds as basically penned up wild animals. While a few others actually are trying out breeding programs.

You simply must read up on domestication in order to get a better handle on it. If you haven't produced a docile strain that can "live" in proximity to humans within a few generations, you're not going to get one without resorting to genetic engineering.
A bison can live on average for 25 to 30 years. Most bison ranchers would herd bison for 10 to 15 years before giving up. Until the 1980's most bison herds were protected by the US or Canadian government. And except for a brief period of time when the Canadian government created the Beefalo (cow-bison hybrid) they did very little selective breeding for domestication.
So most herds have only been 'farmed' for one or maybe two generations, before being put back into parks and corrals with other bison that have never been raised to be nice to humans.

Are you serious? An effort that lasts ten centuries? Paleolithic humans are somehow able to control the breeding of an animal for the centuries needed to domesticate it? Seriously?
Actually yes I am. Although I don't think it would be a concerted effort over that period of time. And it would probably only be a few hundred years. And I am not talking about making them completely tame and happy only in the last century of domestication. At first it could simply be getting them used to being herded. That may be simple or hard. Without horses to keep up to the bison it would be impossible.
Then over a long period of a basic herding process bison would become more used to being handled by people. With a little bit of selective breeding (possible for nomadic and primitive people to do, it could be as simple as killing the more aggressive animals), after more generations bison could become useful for more then simply meat and their skin.
So yeah to get something as useful as a dairy cow, or oxen, it may take 1000 years. To get an animal that will follow you around and not gore you for looking at it funny, may only take 30 or 40.
In Europe the auroch (wild cow) was initially bred to be smaller, and used simply for food. After an uncertain amount of time it was harnessed and used as a work animal. It wasn't until the Roman era that they started breeding cattle to be bigger and they became the modern cow.

Now here's an article you might be interested in. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080310170636.htm
 
Now here's an article you might be interested in.


Domoviye,

I've read that before. You'll notice that while the domestication of the donkey took longer than was originally believed and was not as linear as originally believed, donkeys were still be used by humans in much the same way tame elephants are used in southeast Asia. The donkeys got used to close physical proximity with humans and being handled by humans.

Herding bison and killing off the more aggressive members for no matter how long will not be the same as the process that took place with donkeys or the same as the process that took place with the auroch.


Bill
 
On further thought my time limit is a little out of order. But it may still be possible.
I read an article last year by Sylvia Hardy from Washington University about the domestication of Bison.
Basically she said that bison are in a transition period between wild and domesticated, and its really coming down to individual ranchers. On some ranches the bison were for all practical purposes wild. On others they were far more docile, still wild, but easier to tame, and more tolerant of humans.
Interesting article, but unfortunately I read a copy at a friends home so I don't have it and I'm not willing to quote it from memory.
But here is an outline of it, its on page 56. http://ur.wustl.edu/digest/media/wuurdSpring08opt.pdf Can't find the complete article online unfortunately.


Kalan thanks for the article, I've read it a few times, but I'm going to partly side with Bill. The research is promising, and with more effort it should work, but they're still not truly domesticated. Too many of them are still aggressive, and need to be handled very carefully. Another few generations could change that though.
 
The Soviet project took nearly 50 years of effort to produce all of 700 domesticated examples. That number is now around 100 and they've been selling individuals to further fund their research.

The reason why they have only so little specimen is because of economic problems. It would be easy to produce much more domesticated foxes, if there was a demand.

Are you suggesting that a paleolithic people could have attempted the same program? Or that the effort has produced an animal useful as anything other than a pet?

The reason why the foxes are only useful as pets is because the are foxes. A domesticated buffalo would give milk and meat and would thus be much more useful. And the effort was surprisingly small: The researcher simply crossed the most docile foxes, that was all, they needed to do.

Most tellingly, despite the program's success, the vast majority of silver foxes in human "custody" are still undomesticated, are kept penned, and are "ranched" rather than farmed.

This is because a domesticated fox brings no advantages, it would still have to be keept in a pen, from which it can't escape. A buffalo on the other hand can escape from almost any pen if it tries hard. Thus a domesticated buffalo which doesn't want to escape is an advantage.
 

Hnau

Banned
Bill Cameron said:
That's too late. Horses were extinct in the Americas by ~10,000 BCE.

The survival of the horse in the Americas is the Point of Departure, dude. Are you expecting me to say this, only to wittily reply that the domestication of the horse in Eurasia allowed for the horse to survive in the Americas? Because that may be true, but obviously I'm assuming that somehow we get around that.

Why in the world are we spending this much time discussing all this if we haven't figured out how to make the POD work, guys? Are we just assuming that the theory that the domestication of the horse allowed it to survive in Eurasia is false?
 
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Hnau you make some good points. And I agree that due to different things, your time for domestication of the horse sounds about right.
We're mainly arguing about bison now, which is a side factor for the POD.
 

Hnau

Banned
Bison? Hmmm... I don't think that the Native Americans could do it. Its hard enough as it is now with our modern technology and techniques.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
The reason why the foxes are only useful as pets is because the are foxes. A domesticated buffalo would give milk and meat and would thus be much more useful. And the effort was surprisingly small: The researcher simply crossed the most docile foxes, that was all, they needed to do.

A fox take 1-2 years to become sexual mature it still took 40 years to domesticate it or between 20-40 generation, that's a rather long time, it mean with the same method it would take at least 100-200 years to domesticate the bison, that don't sound like long, but a hunter-gartner people lack the knowhow to repeat the process, plus lack the resources to take that long.
 
The survival of the horse in the Americas is the Point of Departure, dude.


Hnau,

I'm sorry. I got so wrapped in the domestication angle I forgot the actual title of the thread.

Are we just assuming that the theory that the domestication of the horse allowed it to survive in Eurasia is false?

Sadly, that's the best current theory for the survival of the horse. Gould writes about the theory in one of his essays on how poorly evolution is taught.

Children are shown this evolutionary path leading from Eohippus to modern horses as if it is preordained path when what is actually being shown is the slow diminution of the once dominate order Perissodactyla and family Equidae.


Bill
 
The reason why they have only so little specimen is because of economic problems.


Kalan,

It is due to economic problems, but not the one you think.

Domesticated foxes have no great economic use other than as exotic pets. The domestication effort simply can't "pay it's own way" so to speak, it was a byproduct of a project researching something else. Once the research funding was withdrawn, the economic potential of the foxes wasn't enough to continue the program.

It would be easy to produce much more domesticated foxes, if there was a demand.

Exactly, and there's no demand because domesticated foxes are essentially worthless in an economic sense. Spending 40 or more years to produce a new species of pet, and a pet that still isn't wholly domesticated and must caged, wouldn't have paid for itself.

The researcher simply crossed the most docile foxes, that was all, they needed to do.

And it still took them a half century and nearly 40 generations to do so. As I wrote above, if the effort hadn't been part of a larger research project it would have never been attempted.

Thus a domesticated buffalo which doesn't want to escape is an advantage.

Just try and breed some with a paleolithic levels of technology then. Explain how you're going to keep enough breeding stock isolated for enough generations to produce the more docile bison you'll require. Explain how you'll feed them during winter months when you haven't even yet invented hay and you can't let them lose to graze. Explain how a people with a lifespan of perhaps 30 years will keep up a "docile bison" breading "project" for at least two of their own generations.


Bill
 
Let me throw in some thoughts on domestication.

First, the fox would be a terrible species to try and domesticate. The creatures are relatively solitary by nature, have no inherent social structure, are endlessly opportunistic predators/scavengers, are subject to predation and are therefore flighty and easily agitated.

The fact that someone managed to produce a domesticated or even semi-domesticated fox, even after forty generations, is nothing short of remarkable. I would have said it couldn't be done at all.

Could the Bison be domesticated? I dunno. I've been up close to those buggers, and they're big, nasty bastards, very unpredictable, rather high strung for their size. I'd rather try domesticating moose before trying Bison. Moose seem to have a better temperament.

It seems to me though that we're all being a bit doctrinaire on the subject of domestication. Let me make a few observations.

In thinking through domestication and domestication events, one thing that occurs to me is that for the most part, domestication of draft animals seems to follow after organised agriculture, and often significantly later. Societies seem to need to have mastered farming for at least a few thousand years before they get around to domesticating big hauling/draft beasties.

This actually sets up an interesting catch 22. Agriculture tends to occupy the biological resources of a region, and the increased population provided by agriculture generally means that the local landscape gets hunted out. So the problem is that all the good species for domestication tend to get hunted out before they have the chance to get domesticated.

So for a domestication event to occur, there must be biological or geographical factors that preserve the wild species in something like at least occasional proximity too agriculture cultures.

So, in the case of water buffalo, you've got a critter moving in and out of marginal agricultural lands, the camel you've got a creature of deserts at the edges of agricultural territory. The horse is domesticated in Kazakhstan, probably open country migrators passing the edges or agricultural territory. The llama inhabits the Andes, so likely is protected by hill country.

It seems to me that on this basis, there are only ever going to be a few relatively narrow 'interface' zones where both agriculture and successful wild populations are going to overlap, and where domestication events take place.

Another observation is that while domestication events are rare, by their nature, they likely spread real fast. Again, I'm confining my comments to the large draft animals. I haven't seen any formal studies as to how fast a species spreads after domestication, but my impression is that its usually rapid and pretty much through the viable habitat of such an animal.

It seems to me that because Agriculture happens first, perhaps thousands of years earlier, and has spread widely out to the interface areas, then there's essentially a ready made highway for proliferation. Once a species is domesticated, it spreads widely through the agricultural economy that hosted it, allows that agricultural economy to spread more readily. And it seems to jump easily to adjacent agricultural economies.

But that rapid spread has a consequence. I'd argue that each domestication event tends to disable other potential domestication events. Once you've got oxen, why bother to try and domesticate caribou or pronghorns or hippopotamus.

This doesn't mean that every species is hypothetically domesticateable (although the fox example is suggestive). But what it does mean is that likely a lot of domestication candidates in the environment lie fallow or go undomesticated - either because they're wiped out by incoming agriculture, or because prior domestication events take up the niche.

So, I don't think we should close the door on the possibility of other sorts of domestication events, as in Jared's 'Red and Gold' timeline, or threads like this that speculate on possible North American domestications.

Does this mean that the Bison is a likely candidate for domestication? Hmm. Well, it seems to me that under this hypothetical, the bison would have to be shoulder to shoulder with an agricultural society, but not obliterated from the area. I don't think that in the case of bison that the sort of 'interface territory' ever existed. My impression is that agricultural societies and bison were far apart, and that the cultures closest to the bison were hunter gatherers, or at best hunter gardeners, who wouldn't be the right people to make it happen. I think you'd have to mess about to put the right kind of human culture in the right proximity to bison to have a chance. I don't see it as being all that stable a situation, and you'd need some longer term stability for the interface to work.

On the other hand, North American mountain sheep might do the trick, if they were in the right place. Or marsh ungulates like the moose might.

I'm kicking around Giant sloths even as I write. Hmmm. I might go and do interesting violence to someone's not very active timeline.

Another random thought on domestication - is it related to parasitism? It seems to me that the current theory on the domestication of cats and dogs is that they were essentially scavengers at the edges of human culture. With our garbage and our pests, we supplied a ready source of stable food, so the ancestors of dogs and cats just kept hanging around and hanging around....

Looking at agricultural societies, they're likely to produce some relatively eatable goodies, particularly if you're a big ass herbivore. So perhaps we've got something similar happening here. The human presence creates specific food opportunities, so they just start hanging around and hanging around. I don't know that this creates domestication itself. But an inbuilt familiarity with human presence, a tendency not to panic around humans, probably relative freedom from non-human predators and thus less ingrained nervousness.

The role of opportunistic parasites may be a lot more significant to domestication than we assume. And this itself offers up some interesting notions.

Any marijuana farmer can tell you what a pest deer are. Canada Geese are prone to mooching off humans and will stop migrating. Bears are common animals hanging about garbage dumps in rural areas. Are we witnessing pre-domestication events? Or pre-domestication situations?

Of course the problem is that we've already got plenty of domesticated fowl and waterfowl, thank you very much. There's no apparent niche left for the domesticated Canada Goose. As for bears, what would anyone do with domesticated bears - I'm trying to think of what bears might be good for, and basically they're screwed, on the low end, dogs do all that stuff better, and on the draft end, regular draft animals are more efficient.

Still, it might be possible to imagine a society with extremely peculiar needs domesticating bears. Or possibly a society which didn't have any good herbivore or canine forms.

Anyway, just some thoughts. Remember, this is AH, let's not get too doctrinaire. Jared Diamond and his ilk may be smart guys, but all they really do is best guesses.

A final bit of thinking
 
you're missing one vital factor in domestication: the animal's social structure. Horses, cattle, sheep, all have one important factor: they have an 'alpha male' type of society that humans can step into and replace, and thus dominate these animals. NA wild sheep do not have this, and thus were never domesticated, whereas the mouflon of Europe does, and was. Bison don't have this either; herds don't follow a particular leader, but rather several lead cows, while bulls actually live apart from the main herds for much of the year. Plus, there is that inbred migratory urge they have. S. American natives domesticated 3 out of 4 of the camelids there; the 4th one is highly sought after because of it's fleece, but it's social structure doesn't allow it to be domesticated, so it never was. Of course, social structure isn't the whole story... pigs and cats aren't given to this. Pigs do let themselves be dominated by humans, although they don't roam in herds. And cats... well, they were domesticated because it was an advantage to both species; basically, cats stay tamed by never losing all their kitten traits (such as enjoying being petted).
There were plenty of farming societies in N. America that had access to bison, from the SE to the midwest to the east coast (bison ranged clear into PA in pre-Columbian days). They had ample time and opportunity to try domestication, and never succeeded...
 
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