In all fairness, they were different species. In fact the North African Elephant (as well as Syrian Elephant), is extinct - a victim of deforestation.
Yep. That's true. But the whole area of elephants is kind of an interesting subset of the discussion.
A very good point. There's a big argument that the shortage of domesticates in the Americas is a direct result of the fact that most settlement occurred from Siberia and by big game hunters. They seem to have hit the megafauna much harder there than in Eurasia, where there was more opportunity for the wildlife to adapt to human presence. In the latter early settlers were mixed opportunists or dedicated fishermen; possibly some relied on scavenging in the wake of saber-toothed cats (though that's conjecture at this stage).
Nevertheless, there were viable megafauna. We know that the Reindeer is a domesticate or semi-domesticate. And an examination of historical records and legislation from the Baltic and Northern Europe, together with some fascinating Russian experiments in moose domestication persuades me that the moose was an abandoned domesticate or semi-domesticate.
So you could extrapolate from that, that their genetically and behaviourally identical American Caribou and Moose could have been domesticated. The reasons that they weren't, I'd suggest, were that there were no viable points of access for the cultures. Moose and Caribou habitat were hunter gatherer/non-agricultural societies.
In the case of Moose and Caribou, for example, their habitat overlapped strongly with Cree Indians and their relatives - Saulteaux, and rivals, Dene and Ojibwa. These were all mostly riverine cultures which meant that they were moving up and down river systems through canoes. They had an elaborate technology of transportation, which was already capable of freighting goods in reasonable volume with minimal inconvenience.
The Caribou were non-riverine, so in order to domesticate Caribou, the Cree would have had to have abandoned or severely compromised an effective lifestyle economy.
Now, the Moose were riverine animals, so potentially the Cree could have adapted and adopted them. But what for? Their canoe were more than equivalent in carrying capacity, needed less attention and maintenance and were more easily managed (comparatively). There was nothing in Cree technology or society where you could plug the moose in and gain real economic advantages.
Now, conceivably, if wild rice cultivation emerged as a genuine agricultural activity/economy, or some other cultural development, that essentially created a demand for horsepower, then Moose domestication could well have taken hold.
Hypothetically, the Inuit or Dene could have domesticated Caribou and evolved a similar lifestyle to the Laplanders. But as noted, the Dene were already committed to rivers. The Inuit were heavily committed to a seasonal rotational lifestyle which saw them relying upon seal and fisheries resources. I don't think you could transition from there to a Lapp lifestyle, not easily.
And something to consider - the Inuit had already committed to another useful domesticate, dogs. And Dogs as a domesticate may have been incompatible with Caribou.
This, by the way, seems to be what happened to Moose as a domesticated species. Basically, the domesticated moose was pushed out by competition from horses and horse based societies moving out from the south.
Or have a stable, organized culture to maintain those creatures. Remember, however important things like horses, camels, sheep, and goats were to nomadic societies, they all seem to have been first domesticated by settled ones.
Nomadic societies by nature are forced to travel light. They carry a minimal number of tools and artifacts, since there's an economic (lugging shit around) cost. For such society, domestication is generally too much of an investment - they can't afford the front end R&D of domestication, which might take anywhere from a decade or more to a couple of human generations to prove out.
Stable agricultural societies, on the other hand, have enough economic surplus, that they can make the social investment.
Of course, once a product has been proved out, the economics change. Now instead of a generation investment, you've got a product which will produce an immediate return on investment, or at most after a couple of years, and which can dramatically enhance available economic resources - ie lugging shit around capacity, convenient sources of protein, moving faster and further.
That's the current consensus for dogs, actually. Before humans practiced agriculture, they still had garbage dumps, and dogs seem to have adapted to judge human intent from their body language and tone as a protective measure before they established any cooperative relationship with humans.
My thinking is that its not just dogs. It's almost certainly the case for cats as well. And its likely that this was the case for the big ungulate domestics. Early agriculture was essentially a process of modifying habitat and promoting plant species that cows and horses liked.
I've talked to northern prairie farmers who talk about Elk as pests. Essentially, Elk tend to hang around farms, they will watch farmers, and they have demonstrated a fairly sophisticated capacity for knowing when to raid croplands. My thinking is that a version of this probably occurred with cattle and horses, and these animals may well have self selected for human tolerance before they were technically domesticated.
Now, you may be thinking this is crazy talk on my part. After all, the crops that horses and cattle eye so hungrily are crops meant for humans. So obviously, horses and cattle should be considered pests, or nearby protein.
But think about this. In the domestication zones, winter is a real phenomenon. Winter comes, forage goes right down. Horses have to dig up frozen grass with their hooves. In the wild, well, you can make a living. But if there's a harvested farmer's field around.... well, from the point of view of a horse or cow in the winter, its an all you can eat buffet. So in fact, there's very good reasons for horse or cattle to habituate themselves to humans, because even with hunting and hostility, there's more eating opportunities.
Basically, horses and cattle started out as effectively giant fucking raccoons.
The pot deer is cool. I'd be curious if anyone's studied its effect on their nervous system. Societies that planted edible intoxicants may have had a potential advantage in domesticating grazers.
Most of what I know on the subject comes from talking to people who had backwoods grow operations, or through secondhand contacts. At first, it was just a wacky story, but it came up often enough that it seemed to me something was going on there. Given the illicit nature of the enterprise, I'm pretty much certain that no one has studied nervous system effects.
But there is a fair amount of literature which suggests deer and other large animals will actively seek out intoxicants. I've heard some interesting stories about drunken bears.
Overall, we shouldn't make the mistake that herbivores are unsophisticated feeders. They actively select among a variety of plant species, and they display marked preferences among plant species.
Absolutely. In fact in the modern era we now know how to domesticate potentially any mammal or bird. It's just that the expense is not worth it. Organizing the domestication of sperm whales alone would probably require a significant restructuring of the American national budget.
Interesting notion. I think though that the really big nut you'd have to beat with Sperm Whales is their longevity and slow reproduction. Literally, even if you could domesticate within three to ten generations, you've exceeded the current lifespan of the United States. If your domestication process takes longer than your civilization.... problem.
The other obstacle is the economic utility. What benefit could we get from a domesticated sperm whale that would exceed (a) the cost of raising and managing the things; (b) the free value of harvesting free range.
Fascinating notion though. I imagine the sort of culture that ends up domesticating sperm whales is one that has very few options available.
I'm also tweaking the idea of a society that somehow develops the methods the Russians were using from the '50s. Such a society would become unrecognizable if given a couple millenia to extend the practice. It's technically possible - you only need methods, not technology or theory - but admittedly I don't know how it could realistically occur. If it did - almost everything would become "domesticable."
Well, it seems to me that the key would be finding an economic utility.
Also, some domesticates would probably shut the door on others.
Once you domesticate cattle.... well, between leather, meat, milk, pulling plows, carrying loads and hauling wagons or sleds.... that's a diversity of resources and tasks, a combination of meat and horsepower that's just hard to beat.
The other big domesticates that come along later all show up in marginal environments. The horse, the camel, the reindeer, water buffalo, Llama and moose. Camel and Reindeer are popular current domesticates by thriving in environments that kill cattle. Water buffalo also do well, habituated to an environment where they outperform cattle. Llama were able to be established as a domesticate long before cattle showed up, and hold on strongest in hill country where cattle have trouble. Moose and Horses? Well, Horses won and Moose lost.
On another thread, it was suggested that Ostrich were a missed domesticate. I concurr. But I think that this is because, when the domestication opportunities showed up, that cattle and horses essentially had Ostrich so thoroughly outperformed that it just wasn't worth it.
A cattle or horse provided more meat, could carry larger burdens, provided more horsepower and overall gave a better return on investment. So there's no real incentive to domesticate Ostrich.
Conceivably, its possible that Ostrich were actually domesticated at some point by some cultures, and that this domestication was abandoned when the culture got its hands on economically superior critters. I'm blowing smoke here. So far as I know, there's no archeological or historical records to support that.
For the Ostrich to survive as a viable domesticate, it would need an economic (as with horses) or habitat (as with camel and reindeer) niche that would give it at least a local economic advantage.
And remember that there are two phases to the economics of domestication. The 'R&D cost' - ie, the process of domesticating an animal and learning how to maximize its exploitation, is significantly more expensive than the 'operating cost' - ie, the expense or investment once the domestication is worked out and you've learned to maximize exploitation.
So, let me add yet another criteria: Lack of competitors.
My suggestion is that a society would never go through the process of domesticating ostriches, if it already has an alternative like cattle or horses or camels readily available and to hand.
We wouldn't domesticate guineau pigs or turkey as a meat animal, if we already had chickens.
Basically, existing domesticates in a society amount to a barrier to the process of developing further domesticates. Doesn't make it impossible, but it makes it a shitload harder.
Of course, once a domesticate is available, it can find its way into a society that already has domesticates, if it can establish a special niche. In this sense, Turkeys managed a strategic masterstroke against their Chicken nemesis, when they invented thanksgiving (yeah, I know. I'm deliberately phrasing it weird, but the underlying point is sound. Just go with it.)
So, theoretically, we could have had a domesticated Ostrich. What would be required would be an isolated stable agricultural society with reasonable proximity to wild ostrich populations, but with no actual major domesticates of its own (conceivably, it might have had enough contact with other societies to have acquired the idea, but not enough contact to acquire the animals themselves).
That being the case, ten or twenty generations of selective breeding might have produced an Ostrich which was sturdy enough to carry heavy loads, had some reasonable utility as a riding animal, produced valuable down, and laid eggs with the same frequency as a chicken. An animal like that might have had enough entrenched or niche economic utility (Ostrich do well in fairly marginal environments as well) that it might well have survived the introduction of cattle or horses.
I guess my point is that conceivably, we might have a lot of potential domesticates out there, but there were barriers. In a way, figuring out why potential domestications didn't happen or were abandoned, or trying to sketch out cultural criteria for a particular potential domestication is a fascinating exercise.