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Comment by Tossrock | Hacker News Reader

This argument is not very sound. It ignores eg that native Americans had domesticated dogs (like the Hare Indian), the domestication of caribou in the north, the presence of mountain goats and bighorn sheep, etc etc etc. It's like the author thinks the only large mammals in the new world were bison and llamas.

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Dogs do not provide food and barely add additional energy (except in Arctic conditions).

>the presence of mountain goats and bighorn sheep

Perhaps you should watch the second part, which is about domestication. He addresses this point in this part (you seem to have missed it) but explores it more in the second. Some animals are not domesticatable (e.g. zebras) despite seeming that they could be. It isn't like he came up with his list of potential targets of domestication off of the top of his head. There's a reason stuff like bears and deer aren't on it. And he only used bison as an example of something that would be profitable if it was domesticated, but it can't be by pre-modern societies.

Sorry, I was going off the transcript, not the video. In the transcript he talks specifically about the benefit of the domestication of dogs for old world peoples[1], while ignoring the fact that new world peoples also had domesticated dogs.

1: "With dogs, herding sheep and cattle is easier. Now humans have a buddy to keep an eye on the clothing factory, and the milk and cheeseburger machine, and the plow-puller."

That is technically true, but (1) this labor isn't hugely impactful or population enabling and (2) in this case it is being used as an amplifier for other domestication efforts, and without already having other domesticatable animals around you are only getting sled pulling (limited to the Arctic), hunting (helpful, but nothing compared to agriculture), and "plow-pulling" (which seems of dubious value).

Compare and contrast with pigs, chickens, sheep, cattle, horses, dogs, cats, and so on. There were far more in Europe/Asia that lived in close contact with people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domesticated_animals

He also ignores that cows were domesticated from Aurochs before the Bronze Age. Aurochs were as wild as American Bison and (depending on the variant) were the same size or larger.

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