Horses may have been domesticated twice
sciencenews.org
sciencenews.org
The only instance of donestication I really get are cats.
We are fat, with hunched backs, stiff necks and wearing glasses.
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(1) Plus another one linked from that: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesti...
Przewalski's horse, the closest thing to a pre-domesticated horse, is about 660lb. A modern draft horse is over 2000lb.
50 mya, Eohippus was around 20lb - the size of a fox.
https://archive.org/details/horsewheelandlanguage/page/192/m...
I suppose as it relates to this article, the author points out that:
1) "Earliest evidence for possible horse domestication...appeared after 4800 BCE". This evidence comes mostly from cultural artifacts representing the horse, I believe.
2) Looking for physical evidence of domestication is very difficult, but two methods of debatable applicability to horses - size variability and age at death - seems to indicate 2800 BCE and more recent than 3000 BCE, respectively.
3) Evidence of bit wear in teeth provides evidence of horse-riding, which is assumed to post-date horse domestication. Bit wear is evident in teeth whether hard (metal) or soft (leather, hair) bits are used. That evidence pretty conclusively indicates that horse-riding goes back at least until 3700-3500BCE. Domestication of horses (herding) is presumed to predate this by at least another 500 years.
4) To the topic of riding coming after domestication: "What was the incentive to tame wild horses if people already had cattle and sheep? Was it for transportation? Almost certainly not. Horses were large, powerful, aggressive animals, more inclined to flee or fight than to carry a human. Riding probably developed only after horses were already familiar as domesticated animals that could be controlled. The initial incentive probably was the desire for a cheap source of winter meat." The author points out that unlike cattle, horses are able to forage in the winter on their own, making them extremely valuable as livestock for primary and secondary products.
Point 4 is in opposition to this article, and demonstrates the idea championed by the article (horses domesticated for speedy human transport) is not new, per se, but since this article post-dates the book, it should be read as perhaps bringing new evidence to the table for that theory.
Even the oldest books of Rigveda [1] mention "Two bay steeds of Indra". That would be 3500 years old - and they had crossed the Indus by then (if steppe theory is to be believed).
They spread what, 5000 km in a couple centuries? You can walk that in a few months, no horses necessary.
If then you add multiple generations, you can absolutely do it.
Perhaps nuance, but I believe the PIE people are presumed to have developed a cattle-raiding culture, which is just a raiding culture in general regardless of the wealth at hand (slaves, goods, food, etc). As an aside, I'm always fascinated by Ibn Fadlan's observation (877 AD) when going up the Volga that there was a "slaving season". That probably goes back millennia.
Anyway, in turn, some of those bands - much like the much later viking gangs - probably decided to "stay" at the places they raided, which looks a lot like conquest. Anyway, not taking away from your point, just some color. :)
Especially since most of those agricultural society got their law and political organizations from nomads (Turkish 'torük', ancestral law, while influenced by Islam, is definitely from Gotürks' 'türük' which was at the time likely already thousand of years old). Rus political system was also heavily influenced, if not copied from the horde (or rather, the 'ordo', since our vision of what is a horde is now so wrong it isn't funny).
You have to know that the political organization of central Asia nomads stayed stable from before the Xiongnu until the 19ty century, and their administration was as good, if not better than the Ottoman one until cheaper method of making paper was found in the 15th century.
Domestic reindeer were domesticated by a nomadic people, or at least not an agricultural one. When that's said, they don't look "tame" like cows or sheep, but on the other hand anyone who's been involved with bringing in sheep which have spent the whole summer by themselves in the mountains will want to discuss how "tame" sheep can be.. (source: Myself, as a child I joined in the "hunt" every September for many years to help collect my grandfather's sheep)
EDIT: I'm an idiot, there are two even simpler things:
Shish kebab is a thing; it doesn't require settlements. When it comes time to sacrifice, are you more likely to eat the individual who's easy too get along with, or the ornery one?
Rocky Mountain Oysters are things; they don't require settlements. Hence the tripartite nature of Indo-European gender: Bull/Cow/Ox, Stallion/Mare/Gelding, Ram/Ewe/Wether, etc.
The pedigrees of those horses are known. The Cortez expedition was launched by a government and the paperwork still exists. They were good Andalusians. So North American wild horses were descended from good lines of riding animals. They didn't start out feral.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140819083344/http://www.canadi...
Clovis people almost certainly interacted with horses, but likely as food.
Compared to sheep, cattle and dogs, they seem more on the wild side of spectrum than other domestic animals.
It’s a spectrum, some cattle breeds are pretty wild. Dogs are special.
One good measure of domestication would be to compare with zebras which are considered relatively untamable - as in unlike horses they’ll always maintain a violent streak. Ponies tend to be more violent than horses.
They understood the core concept of ‘do not bite the hand that feeds you’ instinctively.
There's this theory that's why there are so few domesticable animals in Africa: that they co-evolved with humans, and the ones who behaved predictably and weren't willing to randomly hurt you for no apparent reason at their own expense, were eaten by our ancestors.
This doesn't make sense to me. Sure, an an animal that is generally a belligerent asshole will discourage humans from trying to tame it, but why would it discourage hunting? If anything, it would encourage hunting the bad animal to extinction, no? Humans successfully hunted Mammoths and other large game even in the stone age, so I don't see how having a bad temper would help.
Africa has some very fertile regions but except for some like the Nile Valley most of them couldn't really compete well with the Yellow River Valley, the Ganges Valley, etc.
Just for comparison, the population of Africa around 1900 was around 100 million, out of which Egypt had 10 million, Ethiopia 10 million, Nigeria 30 million, and 1-2 other population centers around 10 million each. So 70 out 100 million people were bunched up in maybe 5% of the territory.
In the meantime, just India had about 300 million people in 1900 :-) India within from 1500 to 1900 probably had more humans living in it than Africa from the beginning of mankind to 1900.
Just sheer fertility of regions, navigability of rivers, etc, as a Civilization of EU4 player would put it, meant a "better starting position" for some :-p
Half a million years ago, there were large animals pretty much everywhere else on Earth too. They very consistently disappeared right around when humans showed up.
Weird comment.
Sheep and Cows will also act wild if not domesticated; they are just not fast by nature.
Even humans can be on the extreme wild spectrum if not domesticated. There is plenty of evidence even to this day.
What does that mean? Do you mean feral animals? Non-domesticated cows went extinct hundreds of years ago [1]
> Even humans can be on the extreme wild spectrum if not domesticated. There is plenty of evidence even to this day.
What evidence? What is a non-domesticated human?
> A feral child (also called wild child) is a young individual who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, with little or no experience of human care, social behavior, or language. Such children lack the basics of primary and secondary socialization. The term is used to refer to children who have suffered severe abuse or trauma before being abandoned or running away.
My impression was that it could be written as, "The term is _also_ used to refer to ...", but I'm not sure.
By contrast cats are not really domesticated and cannot be, no matter how you treat them. This is why you'll still have things like a cat just randomly attack you in weird circumstances and ways, but because they're tiny and relatively harmless it just makes them hilarious and weird. But it's also why people who miss out on this final nuance, and pick up lynx and similar animals as pets, often end up in the hospital.
A wolf pup raised by humans won’t be anything like a tame dog.
People whose animal experiences are limited to pets and zoos have many wrong ideas about how real wild animals are.
So definitely dangerous, but not in a Wolf way.
One of the main issues with feral/wild dogs (or wolf hybrids) is that they are much less afraid of humans and therefore are more likely to attack livestock, pets or even actual people when given the opportunity. Under normal circumstances actual wolf attacks are (and probably were historically) and feral/hybrid dogs are just attributed to them.
There used to be a huge population of stray dogs in Balkan cities after 1990. (Contraception and culling reduced the numbers quite a bit since then.)
Most of the time, they just went out of people's way, individually or in loose packs. Attacks on humans did happen, but weren't a daily occurrence.
That said, a stray dog in a big city will always find food, so they weren't hungry.
How are they? Really shy and prefer cermonial fights?
I would guess a stray dog is a bigger threat than a wild wolf that have not got its instincts breed away to have the fur in a special way.
(Note, I don't mean I'd rather be in room with a wolf than a stray dog. But that the wolf would bail 1 mile away from me.)
When I read the title, I was thinking I like a horse that's been domesticated the whole time :)
Former or latter, I don't want to actually participate in the full rodeo experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_dog_attacks_in_the_Unite...
No need to blame the victims.
(So this whole discussion just went round in a circle.)
A dog killed an infant as it slept in bed with its parents. The baby's father awoke during the attack, saw the injuries to the child, and immediately killed the dog.
The family dog killed two-month-old Julius who was in her infant bouncer while her father was sleeping. Julius was taken to the hospital where she was declared dead
An eight-month-old girl in a bouncy chair was attacked by the family pet while in the care of her grandmother. Fire and rescue declared her dead at the scene.
Of course unnecessarily risking the life of your child is still a horrible idea (especially considering that a dog might still hurt it entirely unintentionally).
I had believed that I understood when a dog was unhappy. The dog that bit me gave zero indication that I could see. I walked past it and it attacked. I have no doubt that someone very perceptive might have seen it coming but my policy now is to treat all dogs as if they're unhappy until I get super clear sense that that's not the case.
Of course you can. A small tiger won't sleep on your couch and remembers not to make a mess in the house. And when a small tiger attacks you, it can still be dangerous. There are still wild cats around here (in europe) - and they would not get that tame so easily.
(Also you can teach cats some commands, it is just way more work and the commands won't work all the time)
Humans don't die so easily.
Cats can in general play without (seriously) hurting one another or a human.
On the other hand, even a small cat could kill a human by going to the throat, which they could. But they don't. The house cat evolved to manipulate us instead to get what they want, instead of eating and killing us. Those cats that tried that, like tigers, got allmost extinct. And from what I know, there are bigger limits to what a tiger will do, instead of a house cat. And yes, they are bigger and any bad mood of them allways very dangerous.
For instance we were introducing one of our cats to a new stray kitten we found. We've done this plenty of times before and are used to the process including having them play footsie under the door for weeks, reading positive body language (tail posture, etc) and so on. It was all positive. So we let them see each other. Everything was going really well until the kitten decided to boldly just march up to the cat.
Something just clicked in her at that point. The cat, the most docile and friendly cat imaginable, just pounced and decided she was going to wreck the kitten. After separating her we assumed it was her way of trying to roughly assert dominance, reminding the kitten she was being a bit too familiar. That was until we were treating the kitten and saw the bite marks were in the throat area - she would have 100% killed the kitten if we had acted half a second more slowly.
After that she was all back to being nice and friendly outside the door, but we decided to find the kitten a new home instead of risking being a bit too slow the second time.
However, she has her limits, and will often give me a hefty bite if I do something she considers unacceptable, such as stop scratching her ears and instead try to pet her fur or clear it of nestles, which she seems to love collecting.
It is me, being domesticated. I wait for my ears to flop.
also attacking in play is different than attacking, so that should be considered.
* Cats absolutely can be obedient with training. I've been clicker training my cat for years and he can do any trick a dog can do. He also understands his name. I tested this many many times by yelling random words, seeing him continue sleeping, then yelling his name, causing him to jump and run towards me.
* Cats can be trained not to attack at hands like dogs. This is called "cat inhibition" and it's standard practice for cat owners, all good cat owners must know and practice inhibition training.
* Cats clearly prefer sitting next to humans and sleep close to them. If you never experienced this you never lived with a cat long term. It's actually fascinating, when a cat is "sleeping" they're actually not sleeping in a human sense, it's a particularly light sleep. They're still ready to hunt. What most cat owners will see is that when your cat is sleeping next to you, and you suddenly change the room to clean dishes or use the bathroom, your cat will get up and sleep somewhere close to you. Although a human interprets this as cat being lazy, they're exhibiting hypersocial behavior for their species.
* Cats are not weak. Have you ever fought a cat? I did. I'm a full sized human male who weight trains regularly and my cat can barely overpower me if he puts all his power. Go watch some feral cat vet videos, you'll see cats require a strongman sized vet to be fully seized (and rarely some still get away). An adult cat will have no problem overpowering a human female. If you think "cats are attacking their owners" you seriously have no idea how incredibly powerful these creatures are. When a cat slaps you or whatever they're merely warning you in a "polite" way (and, as explained before this is a sort of behavior that can usually be curbed with training)
The whole risk and point of undomesticated animals is that you literally cannot know when they will strike. There are countless examples of people having raised all sorts of wild animals for many years with no incident, and then one day the animal simply kills them, or somebody else, for no reason.
Here’s a nice article about the biological basis of domestication:
But that doesn't address your point about horses seeming to be happy to live in the wild, which would indicate that horses have seen less change from their pre-domestication state than other domestic animals have.
Maybe their role in human societies, as transportation and draft animals, didn't require them to lose as many of the traits of their wild ancestors, as other domestic animals did?
[1]: https://www.medievalists.net/2016/08/horse-fights-the-brutal...
They really hate saying it, don't they.
Wild horses are extinct.
Social structure just like feral horses. Maybe do some research before you tell people they're confused.
Przewalski's isn't relevant.
Is it? Sure, if you start with "we have domesticated horses, how did we get here" then "one event happened" are less assumptions than "two events happened". But if you start the other way around with "humans lived in vicinity of a species that lends itself to domestication" then "they only domesticated it once" sounds like the wild speculation.
Even if you assume exchange between the two civilizations, spreading the idea that horses can be domesticated is much easier and lower friction than spreading actual domesticated horses. Especially with a mountain range involved and early generations of barely-domesticated horses.
Just because you repeat something doesn't make it true.[1] Do you have any actual support for your clam that it took thousands of years?
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[1]: Except for the Goebbelian definition of "true".
He found that by breeding and selecting for the more human friendly animals they became tamer and tamer. Now they are to the point of domestication. True domestication as I have heard from some means that the animal cannot thrive in the wild as its wild counter part can. This is a technical labeling issue as in some dogs have reversed domestication on some islands etc.
The fox story in russia is interesting since they found that there was a reduction in adrenaline in the fox's as they became tamer and tamer. The reduction caused them to adopt traits similar to domesticated dogs: wagging tails, floppy ears, coat color change. They did embronic transplants and found wild mothers with tame embryo's raised tame offspring and the opposite was also true. So it was a genetic change that resulted in this taming. It only took 50 generations to result in the change.
It would not be that far off to think that humans gave food to cooperative animals and killed the aggressive ones.
Under labor conditions I would say at least 50 generations. But without these perfect conditions it is easy to imagine that it takes longer.
2) Foxes. The plural is “foxes”. “Fox's” is the singular possessive, as in “Wow, look at that fox's beautiful pelt!”.
No, seems fifty horse generations would span about 100-150 years: https://thehorse.com/16463/when-are-fillies-fertile/
Source: https://animalcorner.org/blog/horse-lifespan/
In the longest case, we could assume 50 x 30 = 1500 years. If you say that every generation came to live after 5 years, then 50 x 5 = 250 years. Again, you want to pick the absolute lowest bound (lowest number of generations) of the lowest bound (shortest years of generations) under labor conditions, which did not happen in reality. But if you think it took only 100-150 years to domesticate horses, then fine. I cannot provide a definite proof that you are wrong.
Occam's razor is not to be used to say "this explanation sounds complex, there must be a simpler explanation."
Rather, the point of Occam's razor is to say "here I have two competing explanations, and they both amount to the same thing, and we don't have any evidence of one over the other, so let's just pick the simpler one because it doesn't make a difference."
So, for example, if we had absolutely zero evidence as to the domestication of horses, and one person said "they were domesticated once" and another person said "they were domesticated twice", then it all amounts to the same thing (horses were domesticated) and we have no evidence either way, so we would use Occam's razor to favor the first explanation.
But in this case, it appears we do have evidence, so rather than relying on Occam's razor, we should just argue about the evidence instead.
Both hypotheses make the same prediction and have equal explanatory power. I think just one article where they say "may have been" in the title is not enough evidence to overrule occams principle in this case.