As I seem to buy pretty much everything that I think I might ever want to read (and read a small fraction of it, just a couple books a month), I am looking at 1491 right here on top of one of the stacks of books. You make it sound even better than I thought, and if it weren't for the fact that I'm already reading three books (Artificial Things by Karen Joy Fowler, Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman, and The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull) I'd start it tonight.

I have no idea what's under it in the stack; let's see.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro
Widdershins by Charles de Lint
Looking for Jake by China Mieville
Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh
To the Power of Three by Laura Lippman

I could happily read any or all of these. Any chances I will live forever?

Posted September 1, 2006 1:17 AM by Jeffrey Smith

Two quick thoughts:

Jared Diamond deals with some of these issues in Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I wonder what a Diamondian take on those population figures would be. While there certainly were some pretty sophisticated pre-Columbian cultures in North America, I'd think that the lack of domesticatible large animals and food crops would make for constraints on population.

If "human populations will pretty infallibly outbreed their local resources, causing them to abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle"--what about the Australian aborigines?

Posted September 1, 2006 1:18 AM by Russell Letson

I read it last year, and it is probably tops on my list of change in worldview books. It stitched together a lot of things which I had inklings of. The bits and pieces of a voracious interest in the past; and my assumption that the people who lived here were people, and no less clever than those who got here late to the party.

Tom Koppel's "The Lost World" about the settling of the Americas is in the same vein... "Why didn't I think of that. So too is "The Blink of an Eye" by Walter Murch, about the Cambrian Explosion.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:30 AM by Terry Karney

They used fire to create the Midwestern prairie, perfect for herds of buffalo.

Hmmm. I vaguely recall some sort of kerfuffle on this point.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:30 AM by Andy Vance

Russel Leston (#2): I don't think it conflicts with , and the numbers given are in keeping with some of the estimates (lower than some, higher than others). I forget if Diamond made a claim for population or not.

As for the Australians, they were building some agricultural areas in the Murray Basin when the British came to set up shop.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:41 AM by Terry Karney

I read 1491 recently, and it is a good book.

I'd also recommend a book that the article mentions, Crosby's Ecological Imperialism. It's one of the earlier scholarly pieces on this -- predating Diamond, e.g., by more than a decade -- but is still extremely interesting. Even better, it's written with a wicked and bitter irony. One or two people I know who've read it found it offensive, but I think it's the sort of humor that disguises tears. Anyway, another great book on this general subject (ecological history with a Columbian Exchange focus).

Posted September 1, 2006 1:51 AM by Stephen Frug

Certainly better than 1421: The Year China Discovered America, even if many of it's points are in contention. The Amazon certainly was more populated than people think, and the initial complex Peruvian cultures developed without pottery, a rarity for the world.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:54 AM by mattH

I will admit that I've always thought there was something funny about the idea of two whole continents inhabited only by drifty, timeless Indian tribes that stayed small, and evidenced very little technological development from millennium to millennium.

It's a convenient myth for people who want to justify the European conquest of the Americas; if the country was empty what does it matter?

Posted September 1, 2006 1:58 AM by Martin Wisse

Howard Waldrop's Them Bones is pertinent here.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:06 AM by Bob Oldendorf

Mann's book is indeed wondrous. Worth it alone for his descriptions of the myriad ruins of significantly sized cities they're hacking out of the Amazon underbrush as we speak.

Important to stress he's not arguing with established scholarship on his own, and quibbling with its conclusions. Instead he's revealing a vast amount of extremely recent research, archeological digs, rethinking of earlier estimates in light of new information, and so on -- bringing it all to a popular audience for the first time.

This is a good journalist with a great scoop, talking to the best new people in the field and reporting their fresh findings from the front lines of history.

Great summation you make, too: "The story of the settlement of the Americas isn't one of pioneers finding themselves in an untouched Eden. They were resettling a post-holocaust landscape."

Echoes a bit from I think James Loewn's terrific book of the mid-90s, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Text Got Wrong. Can't lay hands on my copy right now, but believe it said something like this about the settlers of Jamestown, Plymouth, and so on in relation to the great plagues which depopulated the East Coast shortly before they arrived:

They didn't woo a virgin wilderness. They found a recently bereaved widow, and raped her.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:15 AM by Bob Devney

I devoured that book in about two days a few weeks ago. It's fantastic reading -- chock full of interesting information, and engagingly written to boot. (And it made me want to run a live-action role-playing game of undead Incan politics, with deceased emperors trying to manipulate events through their mediums and panaqas. ^_^)

Regarding Diamond: 1491 makes a tasty counter-argument to the environmental determinism that drives much of Diamond's book. Mann addresses the fall of the Inca as one of his case studies, and in the list of causes he basically removes guns, removes steel, emphasizes the germs, and tosses in politics. The biggest flaw in Diamond's work is the tendency to disregard human agency (making people the puppets of their environments), and Mann does a good job of focusing on that very point.

The New World was never my focus as an archaeologist, but damn, this was a fun read.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:18 AM by Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan (#11): My greatest complaint with Guns, Germs and Steel came from the introduction, where he said the tribesmen of New Guinea were smarter then Europeans, because they were more practised at memorising things.

It was a small bit of cultural blindness, and one which bothered me as soon as I read it. I wondered what, more subtle, bits of such thinking might be buried in ways/places where I couldn't see it.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:25 AM by Terry Karney

A stfnal connection is that Robert Silverberg back in the '60s wrote a book on The Mound Builders, discussing the megastructures built by somebody in the Mississipi Valley. It's pretty obvious the builders had a large population, mass organization, and advanced technique. What's not clear is when they stopped; there is at least some reason to think they were still building when De Soto's plagues wiped them out. Apparently even after all these years Silverberg's book is considered valuable (it's still in print.)

Posted September 1, 2006 2:29 AM by Rich McAllister

Oh, and check out the Amazon listing for The Mound Builders, in particular the review by Peter Bros. It fired all my "this guy is a crank" neurons. Note that he thinks "twentieth century science" is a conspiracy to suppress the truth. Howerver, he's careful not to say anything particularly odd in the review itself. But he can't resist pointing off to Ancient American Magazine where we can see the cranks revolving at top speed:

In sharp contrast to majority academic opinion, its editorial position stands firmly on behalf of evidence for the arrival of overseas visitors to the Americas hundreds and even thousands of years before Columbus--- not only from Europe, but the Near East, Africa, Asia, and the Western Pacific. Each issue presents such otherwise neglected and even suppressed factual evidence demonstrating the lasting impact made on the Americas by Scandinavian Norsemen, Pharaonic Egyptians, Bronze Age Mediterraneans, Semitic Phoenicians, West Africans, Dynastic Chinese, seafaring Polynesians, and many other culture- bearers.

I can't tell whether this is connected to any of the loonier Mormon "archaeology" or not, but I think not, since they don't mention Hebrews.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:46 AM by Rich McAllister

I think the reason why Guns, Germs, and Steel regarded this progression as deterministic has to do with the following:

"...the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old...."

If I remember correctly, GG&S said this was because the humans who invaded the Americas killed all the large animals that could have been domesticated. The only place such animals could survive to be domesticated was where they evolved with humanity, in Africa. Every other continent where humans arrived on the scene later was at a massive disadvantage, comparatively.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:47 AM by Andrew Pontious

Andrew Pontious (#15) No, the issue with domestication isn't one of co-evolution, but of compatible traits.

Cattle, goats, horses, sheep and water buffalo are not native to Africa. The animals which are (cape buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, girrafe, elephant, kudu, eland, etc.) aren't very possessed of such traits.

They need to be social, hierarchal and willing to make people the alpha leader of the band, as well as breeding well in captivity.

Horses do this, Zebras (closely enough related to make a type of mule from) don't. They can't be domesticated, merely tamed.

The majority of domesticable animals come from the Fertile Crescent (water buffalo and dog being the two exceptions which spring immediately to mind). It happens, as well, that those regions also had easily domesticated grains.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:56 AM by Terry Karney

Rich McAllister: A stfnal connection is that Robert Silverberg back in the '60s wrote a book on The Mound Builders [..]

He mentioned in that book that there had been a popular genre of “mound builder fiction” in the 1800's; imaginative tales told of the vanished race. Apparently Joseph Smith had been a fan. I believe Silverberg made the claim in that book that an analysis of The Book of Mormon found substantial matches in phrasing with one of these books (the King James Bible was apparently another source).

Posted September 1, 2006 3:01 AM by Rob Rusick

As far as I know, human populations will pretty infallibly outbreed their local resources, causing them to abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and go over to settled agriculture, animal husbandry, and the invention of gods, beer, and labor-saving devices.

This isn't necessarily true and depends very heavily on environment. Take, for example, Siberian tribes who didn't do any kind of settling until the Soviets forced them to. In an environment like Siberia agriculture isn't a viable option, and out-breeding the local resources would necessitates removal to another location with resources. Siberian and Lapland tribes were known to follow hers of reindeer who couldn't be domesticated but were effectively dinner on four legs so long as you kept up with them.

Agriculture isn't always the most viable choice for a group fo humans. Even in the fertile crescent when agriculture caught on caloric intake increased significantly, but so did malnutrition. You just don't get all your protein and vitamins from wheat.

Large populations will always require some form of entrenched dependable food source in order to sustain itself, but the price for this is often very high. Laboring over a crop requires much more work than spending a few hours catching a deer while the women gather berries.

That doesn't even get into "hunter-gatherer" societies who actually do practice some form of agriculture, just not every year or in large quantities. There are rampant problems with that black and white breakdown too.

I read that article when it came out in the Atlantic Monthly. I'll have to check out the book.

Posted September 1, 2006 3:58 AM by Anaea

So the Siberians and the Australian aborigines didn't turn to agriculture; which I think proves only that they weren't inhabiting arable land. If their groups are staying the same size, either something is inhibiting their fertility, or the difficult conditions of their lives are giving them a high childhood mortality rate, or they're practicing infanticide.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:17 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Bob Devney wrote:

They didn't woo a virgin wilderness. They found a recently bereaved widow, and raped her.

Ummm... Excessively emotive, much?

I'd certainly be the last to deny that in the colonisation of the Americas Europeans did things that are morally repugnant. Many times over, in fact. But to expect anyone of that age to have any concept of the diseases they carried is to twist morality a little too far.

I'm certain that many of the European colonists genuinely had few scruples about the native population being reduced. I'm equally certain that many had no idea that that is what had happened, and were only looking for some land on which to make a living.

There are plenty of things that the settlers can be accused of - the forcible religious conversions of the South Americas spring to mind - but to lump the whole lot of them in as "raping" something is to vastly simplify what happened.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:42 AM by Jim Millen

I don't have a copy of Guns, Germs and Steel to hand, but I remember Diamond suggesting death rates upwards of 90% for the native Americans from disease after the arrival of Europeans, with complete depopulation of whole swathes of land.

On a lighter note, here's an Irish 1492 themed beer ad.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:17 AM by Niall McAuley

The chapter about black earth in the rainforest is worth the price of the book.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:19 AM by TomB

Jim Millen (#20) One thing various readings point out is that, esp. at the beginning, the colonists were aware that the indigenous people were dying out. At least one of the early winters in Massachussetts was survived by raiding the storehouses of recently emptied native villages.

I'll grant that those who moved further west didn't know what the population there was like before they arrived, but the analogy still has some merit, as the locals weren't in much position to hold off the intruders.

One need not know a person is recently bereaved to end up taking advantage of their weakness.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:21 AM by Terry Karney

Thanks, T!

Yet another great book on my list of "things to buy when I finally find gainful employment again..."

Posted September 1, 2006 6:37 AM by Colleen Lindsay

Terry Karney:

One need not know a person is recently bereaved to end up taking advantage of their weakness.

Fair points, and I'm certainly not trying to apologise for what the settlers did. I just dislike analogies to such violent and emotive subjects as rape, since it polarises the debate too swiftly. Rape is a horrific crime and cannot be excused under any circumstances. The actions of the settlers could indeed be considered as wrong, but it's certainly not so black and white.

Posted September 1, 2006 6:43 AM by Jim Millen

My initial response to the post was "This is news?" But then I've been round the Incan settlements and the like.

And re: Diamond, GGS appears to be right - but anywhere I know about the subject, he messes up some of the details.

Posted September 1, 2006 7:47 AM by Francis

TomB: The chapter about black earth was entirely new to me, and completely fascinating. I'd known about the soil problem if you log off rainforest. These people understood it, had (uniquely) come up with some kind of fix for it, and were bringing wide-scale arboriculture to the Amazon Basin. It's breathtaking.

Posted September 1, 2006 8:03 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I'd argue that manifest destiny, the worldview of NA settlement through the time of American expansion, wasn't about an untouched Eden; it was about coming into a howling wilderness and taming it, carving out a new life for yourself with little more than the pack on your back and your moral strength and quick wits.

I sing in the choir at the church where Abigail Adams is buried, and we sing a hymn she wrote from time to time. It's nice, and historic, and pretty, but certain of the lyrics are appalling-- touching on manifest destiny, and moral worth as a criteria for colonization, and taking over what the savages aren't worthy of.

The Eden view came in retrospect, as well as the reverence for untouched Nature. During the age of American manifest destiny Nature was frightening, and to be put into a box if at all possible.

From the article: Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk-drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals.

I suspect this may be muddling cause and effect. Native Americans aren't weird for not being able to digest lactose; the Europeans, who had cows and milk around to adapt to, are the weird ones for being able to digest it. Moreover, milk-bearing animals are generally tasty to eat, and some of them can carry or pull things. So it's not like milk is the only reason to domesticate them.

And then, too, not all animals are good candidates for domestication. Some animals adapt well to fences, while others don't. (I seem to recall deer as one of the "very hard to domesticate" group.) The argument I've heard advanced is that Native Americans didn't domesticate many animals because they didn't have many domesticatable animals available to them.

Posted September 1, 2006 8:12 AM by G. Jules

Horses [are social, heirarchical, and willing to accept humans], Zebras (closely enough related to make a type of mule from) [aren't]. They can't be domesticated, merely tamed.

No offense or anything, but has anyone tried? I mean seriously tried, over the course of a number of generations, rather than catching some zebras, breeding them, and being discouraged when the offspring don't act domesticated. It took about 30 generations in foxes, for example.

It's just that I read GG&S. And while it was impressive at first, after a while I started noticing that, any time I actually knew anything about a topic, Diamond was either outright wrong or twisting his interpretations, which makes me wonder about the topics I'm not familiar with.

I think he's got more going with north-south vs east-west orientation than with the "lack" of domesticable animals in the Americas. Just for one example, a bison is huge and ornery and scared of people...but no more so than an aurochs.

Posted September 1, 2006 8:54 AM by Carrie S.

The continuation of the hunter gatherer culture amongst Australian Aborigines was explained in Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Flannery's The Future Eaters. The Australian continent lost a significant proportion of its large animals in the period immediately after the arrival of the Aborigines (the proposed explanations for this are still the matter of controversy). Australia lacked the pool of animals and plants that could have formed the basis of a settled agricultural communities. Also, the soils are poor and the weather variable. The largest river basin Murray-Darling did have settlements and fixed structures along its banks but even here the river would from time to time run dry.

Posted September 1, 2006 9:07 AM by Styx

1491 was a fantastic book: a quick and easy read but stuffed with information and references. However, remember that Mann is careful (in most places) to add caveats about the ideas he is describing: they are almost all controversial (some are beyond controversial, into "scream-fit inducing" in the proper quarters), and a lot more research is needed before they become established. But that's how science works.

The section on the Amazon was for me the most gosh-wow part. I had previously been exposed to the idea that North America had a much larger pre-Columbian population than most people believe, but never, never had read that the Amazon might have supported a civilization (except of course, in the stories about the "legends" of Amazon cities that motivated some of the Spanish explorers -- they don't look quite so silly after reading this book).

1492 would make a great reading assignment paired with The Years of Rice and Salt.

Posted September 1, 2006 9:17 AM by DaveL

WRT zebra domestication, there are some nifty Victorian pix here of zebras in harness, plus bonus ostrich, elk, and wapiti (or alternately, ostrich, moose, and elk).

Posted September 1, 2006 9:22 AM by Julie L.

Russell Letson #2:

Indigenous American peoples cultivated maize, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, quinoa, bitter cassava (manioc), sweet cassava (yucca), and various kinds of beans. They domesticated a number of animals,including dogs, llamas, and alpacas, and obtained protein from hunting birds (such as wild turkeys), and larger animals such as bison, as well as by fishing.

Some of these activities required fairly complex technologies (bitter cassava, for example, is naturally poisonous).

Posted September 1, 2006 9:32 AM by Fragano Ledgister

Count me as another reader who was a bit skeptical of Diamond's geographical "just-so stories" in Guns, Germs, and Steel. I was particularly taken aback by the claim that geography explains why China had a single ruling structure, while Europe had many distinct states. This has been true over the past thousand years or so --- but around 200 AD, both Europe and China had a single dominant ruling structure (Rome and the Han dynasty, respectively), and after that, both fell apart into patchworks of territories controlled by local warlords. China's had a unitary government more often since (if you don't count the Holy Roman Empire in Europe!), but not more often enough to make for a really convincing case that something beyond historical contingency ("yeah, it just happened like that") is needed to explain it.

As to his remarks on the mental skills of the people that modern Americans are likely to call "primitives", he's a bit more persuasive in Collapse when he points out that a key reason for the failure of the Norse colony in Greenland was the failure of the Norse to adopt the better-adapted and in many respects superior technology of the Inuit...

Posted September 1, 2006 9:35 AM by "Charles Dodgson"

Hunter-gatherer groups often consiously kept their populations down. Most people are quite willing to accept that hunter-gatherers were quite knowledgable about their environments and that they exploited a wide range of foods. The flip side is that they likely had just as wide a range of knowledge about the dangerous plant and animals that they had access to in their environment, and that some suitable plants were used as abortifacients. Some have even been found in coprolites that would function quite well.

As for GG&S, and even Collapse for that matter, Francis(in #26) is dead on. He has an interesting, and perhaps even correct, thesis, but he often gets the details wrong in relation to specific cultures. Besides glossing over the relationship between Pizarro, disease, and politics and the collpse of the Inca, he gets the Anasazi wrong, arguing for Chaco canyon's collapse as entirely environmental, while it may certainly well have been political and trade oriented. He's pretty slopppy in his work with ancient cultures.

Posted September 1, 2006 9:38 AM by mattH

He did specifically label the bit about China at the end of GG&S as speculative & something he's not so sure about. Which didn't keep me from rolling my eyes at it.

Posted September 1, 2006 9:43 AM by Tom Scudder

I haven't read the book, but I will -- it sounds fascinating.

Question: Were there any potato famines in the post-Columbian Americas, like the one that struck Ireland in the 1800s? (The Great Potato Famine was caused primarily by a lack of genetic diversity: most of the Irish farmers grew the same kind of potato which wasn't resistent to the disease.)

Quote:
"Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals(...)"

There's stuff for a science-fiction story in that quote:
Alien visitors nearly wipe out mankind, not because they are many or well armed -- but because their filthy livestock/pets breed out of control and spread deadly plagues...

Posted September 1, 2006 9:51 AM by A.R.Yngve

I have a fantasy bookshelf of books I wish someone else would write, so I could find out without having to do all theat research. One of them is a "pre-Columbian cookbook" -- of the 'Old World'.
Italian cooking without tomatoes; curry and Szechuan cooking without chilis; peasant food without potatoes; etc.

* * *

I thought the story of the "Pilgrims" was pretty well documented. A bunch of losers who couldn't even get along with the Dutch (what a concept!) end up in Massachusetts instead of Virginia. But there are entire farming villiages available to move into, since a massive plague had just come through, and then out of the forest walks a guy who'd been a slave to the Spanish, learned English, gotten his freedom, made his way back home -- and found these ninnies he had to teach agriculture to!
You can't make stuff like that up.

Posted September 1, 2006 10:03 AM by Neil in Chicago

I have a fantasy bookshelf of books I wish someone else would write, so I could find out without having to do all theat research. One of them is a "pre-Columbian cookbook" -- of the 'Old World'.

Start here, and move on to web searches like "SCA period recipes". :)

Posted September 1, 2006 10:10 AM by Carrie S.

Were there any potato famines in the post-Columbian Americas, like the one that struck Ireland in the 1800s? (The Great Potato Famine was caused primarily by a lack of genetic diversity: most of the Irish farmers grew the same kind of potato which wasn't resistent to the disease.)

From what I've read, there was genetic diversity going on all over the place, in part due to the difficult geography of the Americas. Stuff that grows well in one area just isn't suited for some other, which may be only a few miles away as the crow flies. So probably not on the scale of the Irish famine, if at all.

Posted September 1, 2006 10:11 AM by Carrie S.

I haven't read 1492 yet. About Diamond, it looks obvious from his writing that he started with a catchy idea and then looked for data to support it. This is not exactly a criticism. If you're going to look at all of anthropology and all of archeology and all of economic geography and all of human ecology, you aren't going to get many of the details straight. Better to concentrate on the parts that make some kind of sense to you.

My point is more that while he writes as if there is overwhelming data supporting his conclusions, it's good to remember that what's going on is he has appealing ideas which are compatible with some of the data.

Posted September 1, 2006 10:15 AM by J Thomas

Re: #15 and #16 -- Overkill is one of two major hypotheses for why the Americas lost most of their megafauna (big animals) after the arrival for humans, but it's under serious debate; the most-hunted species in North America was Bison bison, which survived quite happily, while others for which we have no evidence of hunting died off. Hunting may well have played a role, but climate change might be the true culprit. But either way you slice it, it's true that the New World was left with very, very few animal species suitable for domestication, compared with the Old World. (Fewer of those are from the Fertile Crescent than you might think, btw. I'm too lazy to drag out my list and map, but horses are probably from the Russian steppes.)

Re: #28 -- exactly. Lactase persistence arises because groups relied heavily on domesticated, milk-producing animals; it isn't the cause of that reliance.

Posted September 1, 2006 10:21 AM by Marie Brennan

Neil in Chicago (#38): I don't think I would be unhappy to see that cookbook remain in Lucien's library, myself - there's enough boring food in the world without offering up assistance. Fusion is good!

But I see from Carrie S's response that mine may be a minority viewpoint.

Posted September 1, 2006 10:57 AM by debcha

Debcha, all I'm going to say is that no cuisine that mixes beef, apples and that much pepper can be boring. :) Trust me, I've been to a lot of SCA events; the only ones at which the feasts were boring were the ones where the cooks decided they had to feed us modern food.

Posted September 1, 2006 11:16 AM by Carrie S.

I was reading 1491 last summer and was utterly fascinated by it.

A.R. Yngve #37: I believe the Inca empire had a great diversity of potato breeds that are even now sought out in isolated corners of the Andes. And I have never heard of a widespread famine there such as in Ireland. The empire was large enough and well-organized enough to have withstood local famines.

Posted September 1, 2006 11:57 AM by Robert L

From memory, the Irish Potato Famine hit potato stock that wasn't just non-diverse (all one species or cultivar) but was a monoculture in the absolute sense, clones (grown from eyes, I believe) making up the majority of the potato fields. Wiki just calls it the "lumper" variety, nothing about whether the crops were sexually or asexually propagated.

I may be wrong, but I remember it as a warning against such extreme monoculture agriculture.

Posted September 1, 2006 12:22 PM by BSD

#38: I thought the story of the "Pilgrims" was pretty well documented. A bunch of losers who couldn't even get along with the Dutch (what a concept!) end up in Massachusetts instead of Virginia.

The story I remember hearing suggested that the Pilgrims were worried about their children becoming Dutch, which is why they went looking for someplace else (and Merrie England wasn't showing any immediate signs of becoming less sinful, so that was out).

Posted September 1, 2006 12:23 PM by Peter Erwin

Carrie S said (#29):
No offense or anything, but has anyone tried? I mean seriously tried, over the course of a number of generations, rather than catching some zebras, breeding them, and being discouraged when the offspring don't act domesticated. It took about 30 generations in foxes, for example.

The point isn't whether, given sufficent time, leisure, scientific resources, etc., you can selectively breed a species into domesticity; it's whether you can do this relatively easily in a pre-modern society, and whether certain characteristics of the wild animal give you a head start and a fighting chance. The fox reference you cite was a 20th Century scientific experiment by full-time researchers, supported by an advanced, industrialized society. That's not how horses, cattle, pigs, etc. were actually domesticated.

Posted September 1, 2006 12:42 PM by Peter Erwin

I should make it clear, btw, that Mann's book doesn't set out to debunk Diamond's, and a lot of Diamond's points continue to stand just fine (the lack of suitable animal domesticates, frex). Instead it adds to the picture, making the environmental conditions just one part of a complex situation.

Posted September 1, 2006 12:52 PM by Marie Brennan

The point isn't whether, given sufficent time, leisure, scientific resources, etc., you can selectively breed a species into domesticity; it's whether you can do this relatively easily in a pre-modern society, and whether certain characteristics of the wild animal give you a head start and a fighting chance.

I guess I wasn't really clear, sorry.

My point was, the original wild horse was not an easy animal to domesticate, any more than a zebra is; an aurochs was no more easy to domesticate than a bison; a wolf is just as ornery as a fox; if we want to talk about animals in which domestication is going against the beast's basic nature, let's discuss cats.

The fox reference you cite was a 20th Century scientific experiment by full-time researchers, supported by an advanced, industrialized society.

Yes, and it still took 30+ generations to get a domesticated animal out of it--that was kind of my point. Heck, foxes are even canines. How long did it take with horses, dogs, cows? Not significantly longer than it'd take with bison, zebras or elk, I'd warrant, but longer than it took with the foxes.

As for "scientific experiment", the methods part was nothing a premodern society couldn't do, i.e. "keep the beasts confined and only allow the most friendly ones to breed". The science comes in in the record-keeping part.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:21 PM by Carrie S.

Carrie in #29 --

Buffalo are hopeless candidates for domestication. The bulls hit 4 years old and will go through your fence or die trying.

It's been tried repeatedly for the last hundred years or so, since buffalo are very tasty, and if you can manage the really insane -- cubic meter stone blocks, 12" pole palisades, etc. -- fencing that will mostly hold the cows and the young, it's possible to farm buffalo, but no one has managed to really domesticate them.

It's been seriously tried with zebra, too.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:23 PM by Graydon

Fun and controversial book about domesticating canines:

DOGS, by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger

They suggest that the "dogs are wolves bred for tameness" story is way too simple, given how touchy wolves are. They hypothesize that a branch of asian wolves met us half-way, by evolving into a somewhat less suspicious (and kind of dim) neolithic-village- dwelling commensural subspecies.

All sorts of good stuff about early working dogs, and how most dogs around the world still pretty much live like neolithic village mutts.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:24 PM by Stefan Jones

#46: Potatoes are seldom or never sexually propagated in a field setting, so yes, the Irish susceptibility problem involved a single clone or very small number of, probably, related clones.

Thoughts on horse domestication: Przewalski's horse, which is extinct in the wild, is technically related to the domestic horse as a subspecies, although they're probably the same thing (afaik both male and female "hybrids" are fertile, just for one point). The P-horse is much closer to the zebra than to old Dobbin, conformationally and behaviorally.

I've been fascinated by the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA findings in the domesticated horse. While Y chromosome (and thus genetic male line) diversity is easily picked up in other species, so far none (as in, none, not very little) has been detected in the horse. This contrasts with a substantial range of equine mitochondrial (and thus genetic female lines) variation.

One reading of this (I grant not the only possible one) is that domestication of the horse originated with one wild population which had trainable males. In this model not just the concept of domestication passed from one human population to another, but the actual physical breeding stock, or at least the sires, with females being recruited from local wild herds outside the origin of domestication.

Off topic, I suppose, although it would imply that not all species followed the same route to domestication.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:25 PM by cmk

WRT Zebras. There are people who have tried. As said, absent a huge investment in time, equipment, and medical support, it doesn't look possible. Certainly what one gets, if it can be done, will be more like a domestic dog than a wolf.

They are aggressive, escape prone and not really worth the candle. Since there are cattle in some of the areas some zebra live (though not in the tse-tse zone) which were domesticated, it's not as if the locals were unaware of the idea.

As for Diamond, GS&S has a lot of speculations (and I am leery of unified theories) but he's a pretty well respected scientist (if the list of secondary citations of his papers are to be believed). I don't know how many of his flaws are the trials of compression; in trying to make things more accessible to the public, as compared to weakness in theory, or being wedded to conclusions.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:26 PM by Terry Karney

To measure how easy animals are to domesticate, you need a population of the undomesticated animal to compare. Where are you going to find a population of wild horses that isn't contaminated with domestic genes?

There's no particular reason to think that domestication started out intentional. If you herd wild animals and preferentially kill the ones that are hardest to herd, that will get you visible results in ten or twenty of the animals' generations, depending on how many animals get killed being herded versus never getting herded, and how much crossbreeding they do.

If people domesticate one animal by accident they might start trying for others, and they'll tend to succeed with the easiest ones first. But we don't know how hard it was to domesticate the first animals because we mostly don't have any of those animals left, we only have their domesticated descendents -- who look particularly easy to domesticate because they've already been bred for it.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:30 PM by J Thomas

Graydon, #51: Twelve-inch pole palisades? It kinda doesn't look that way to me. Granted, one does hear about Interstate 79 being occasionally covered in buffalo; on the other hand, one hears that about cows, too.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:36 PM by Carrie S.

J Thomas, #55: Yes, thank you! That was a much better summing-up than what I said.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:37 PM by Carrie S.

Buffalo are hopeless candidates for domestication. The bulls hit 4 years old and will go through your fence or die trying.

Graydon, if you want to live with buffalo, and you don't want to move with them, then you'll look for the ones that least want to go through your fences.

Like, make a fence out of rawhide with feathers stuck in it, and put it up occasionally, and kill the first one that breaks it. Pick it up and tie it together for next time.

Maybe part of what worked for domesticating aurochs was killing the largest for trophies. Easier to take later steps when they'd trimmed down some. But they were kind of domesticated while they were still pretty big.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:41 PM by J Thomas

About Germs, Guns and Steel, which I read after my younger child finished it for AP World History:
The anthropologist in me found it a fine occassion to indulge in an internal rant about the limitations of history as an intellectual discipline. The fact that the more one knows about any of Diamond's subjects ,the more likely one is to be able to refute him point by point is pretty good indication that he's on very thin ice indeed.

About potatoes, and the potato famine:

The best short explication of why the Inca Empire could depend on potatoes for a crop and the Irish were not is in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire but the core reason was touched above: there was a complex mosaic of potato cultivars in the west coast of South America, and up into the Andes, adapted for different growing conditions or simply historic artefacts of local traditions and familial inheritance; in Ireland in the first half of the 19th century there was a single cultivar.

About mixed agriculture as an index of "civilization:"

Again, the anthropologist in me groans at this remnant of Victorian historical speculation. This is probably because I'm a Pacific Northwest Coast specialist, but really: there are other ways to reach the level of security and surplus that can lead to the development of complex cultural institutions. Just because small grain agriculture and the domestication of herd animals for food sources and traction beasts was what allowed the cultures of Eurasia to do it doesn't even mean it was a good idea in the long run, let alone the only way to go.

Posted September 1, 2006 1:54 PM by JESR

Pacific Northwest Coast specialist

I can see where beasts for traction wouldn't do well in that area, and agriculture might be problematic. What did they do beside fishing/whaling, just out of curiosity?

Posted September 1, 2006 1:59 PM by P J Evans

#52 Stefan - Granted this knowledge came from a comic book, but one suggestion is that dogs were lazy wolves following us for scraps, then got wise that we sucked at tracking an hunted stuff down themselves, letting us do the actual killing. Lazy part being my own cynical reading between the lines.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:22 PM by dolloch

re: #60 To clarify: Do you mean for food or in general?

The Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian have a fascinating culture. The best thing I can remember from learning about them in elementary school was that the Tlingit had a saying equivalent to "Only idiots starve" because so much food was readily available on the beach. Intertidal areas have a lot of food for the picking (says the girl who grew up in a family of commercial fishers).

I'm not an expert on PNW cultures, I'm dying to read the reply! And if you have a chance to check out the UBC Anthropology Museum in Vancouver, it is a great way to spend your time.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:31 PM by Tania

I just knew those damned pigs were up to something.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:44 PM by JonathanMoeller

#61: The proto-pariah-dogs that the Coppingers' hypothesize is a sort of lazy wolf; a scrap- and - shit eating scavenger that was handy to have around (barked at intruders).

Specific breeding for tracking, herding, pulling and so on came later.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:44 PM by Stefan Jones

Either, both...I'm not up on that area, being from CA. I know that the CA natives were good basket-makers and knew how to handle acorns, but we didn't learn much else about them in school. (The baskets can be spectacular, even in small sizes. At the Southwest Museum I saw one decorated with quail plumes to resemble a sea-urchin.)

Posted September 1, 2006 2:45 PM by P J Evans

> Like, make a fence out of rawhide with feathers stuck in it, and put it up occasionally, and kill the first one that breaks it. Pick it up and tie it together for next time.

What I understand Graydon to be saying (he's done the reading, I haven't) is that, after you have reached your fifth year of raising calves, you have no bulls left. For a selection scheme to work, there has to be a docile gene available to select for.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:45 PM by Jonquil

Stefan Jones (#52) - The common picture I think we all have of the history of dog domestication goes like this:

Og the caveman and the rest of his tribe are sitting around the fire. Wolves are naturally scared of them, but are driven by hunger to come closer and closer. Og tosses the occasional bone (literally) to the wolves. Perhaps he adopts a pup or two. This goes on for thousands of years, and eventually you have domesticated dogs as a result.

But this image really makes no sense. Wolves are wild animals with sharp pointy teeth. All the wolves have to do is eat one or two babies and Og and his fellow tribesmen will think better of the whole adopting-wolves thing, and quite likely the whole letting-wolves-live thing.

More likely that dogs are descended from scavengers, who lived off the trash heaps surrounding primitive villages. Most of 'em would be fearful of people, and would run off or attack when approached by people. However, some would be more human-o-philic, so to speak -- they'd stick around when humans were nearby, and not attack. Those are the ancestors of the current population of dogs.

The source for the preceding is that ever-reliable reference work: Some Documentary I Saw On Teevee Sometime.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:47 PM by Mitch Wagner

As long as we're talking about the Potato Famine, don't forget the economic and political forces that had the Irish peasantry raising grain for export while depending upon potatoes for their subsistence crop. (If I'm recalling correctly, potato crops all over Europe failed in the 1848-49 time period, but other places didn't share all of the peculiarities that made Ireland's situation worse.)

Posted September 1, 2006 2:50 PM by Debra Doyle

As some of the buffalo herdsmen here in Ohio say, "an electric fence that would knock a grown man ten feet is merely a gentle reminder to the Buffalo where the edge of the field is."

And once a bull gets wind of a female in heat, your only option to stop him is culling him. And then you have no bull.

Just as a reference, most domesticated cattle have the same problem, but a nose ring helps control the bull (still a struggle). This is why bulls are corraled separately and are upwind. A buffalo wouldn't care about the nose ring.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:54 PM by Steve Buchheit

Mitch:

That's the Coppingers's theory, in other words. I believe I saw Some Documentary, and they were on it!

Posted September 1, 2006 2:56 PM by Stefan Jones

Stefan and others (#52 et seq.): The idea that the domestication of dogs began with them parasitically/symbiotically living with humans is pretty much the accepted story for cats - they hung out in our granaries and fields and ate mice, but it wasn't until a millennia or two later that they were actually bred by humans.

Posted September 1, 2006 2:57 PM by debcha

Carrie S (#44): Debcha, all I'm going to say is that no cuisine that mixes beef, apples and that much pepper can be boring.:)

You're right. 'Boring' is not the word that comes to mind. :)

Posted September 1, 2006 2:59 PM by debcha

Mitch, it was probably more along the lines of "Og kills wolf parents and takes wolf pups home. (probably several different litters) Wolves are highly sociable animals and imprint on Og and his wife as alphas. When wolf #2 tries to cow Og's kids, Og wacks wolf on nose reminding him of dominance. Wolf #2 abides by pack behavior and lets off." Eventually the wolves will breed as even in the wild, alphas aren't the only ones to mate, but alphas won't abide another pregnancy in the pack. An alpha wolf would drive off or kill the pregnant female (and consort). In the human pack, that wouldn't happen.

Posted September 1, 2006 3:00 PM by Steve Buchheit

It's off-topic, but there was another fascinating "debunking" of one of Diamond's just-so stories in a recent American Scientist. According to the author: the real reason that the Easter Island was denuded of all its trees was not deforestation by the Polynesian settlers, but rats. The rats came over with the Polynesians, and found the nuts of the native species of palm trees very tasty. So no new trees grew to replace those that died or were cut down. He also says that there's no archaeological evidence for the huge population boom that was theorized in order to postulate enough people to cut down all the trees; the population was apparently fairly steady until the Europeans came (at which time there may have been a few stands of palm trees left).

Posted September 1, 2006 3:07 PM by Peter S.

Debcha, #72: You don't have to like it, but since your main thrust was that "there's enough boring food in the world", I figured I'd refute the idea that cooking without tomatoes and chilis is boring. :)

Wish I could get the recipe for that meatball appetizer thing they did at the last event I went to. I guess I'll have to ask around and find out who cooked.

Posted September 1, 2006 3:13 PM by Carrie S.

To expand on #73, the reason "Og kills wolf parents and takes wolf pups home", rather than killing the pups too, is because the pups are cute. And if they're young enough, they're probably also quite friendly. You can kinda picture it: Og and Thud are standing there starting to skin the wolf when they hear whimpering from the nearby hole. They look in. There are the pups, their eyes just open. Thud says, "Awww, what a shame. They're so cute. It's too bad they eat meat, the kids'd love them." Og says, "Y'know, I've seen the grownup ones eat some pretty high carrion, I'll bet the pups could too. We can give it a try anyway." He reaches into the den; the pups aren't old enough to react with fear yet, and decide that anything warm and smelling of food is better than nothing, so they get even cuter.

The rest, as they say, is prehistory.

Posted September 1, 2006 3:19 PM by Carrie S.

To #60, I can see where beasts for traction wouldn't do well in that area, and agriculture might be problematic. What did they do beside fishing/whaling, just out of curiosity?

The land between the mountains and the coast was rich with all kinds of resources. Cedar trees were used in countless ways -- as lumber for building plank houses, for carving dugout canoes, a houseposts and all the various types of totem poles. The fibrous bark was shredded and twisted to make cord for fishing nets, bindings, and clothing. If I recall correctly, famous Chilkat blankets were woven with dog wool or mountain goat wool over a warp of cedar fibers. Nettles were also used for fiber. Cattails were woven into mats, and many other fibrous materials (spruce roots, beargrass, etc.) were used for baskets.

In the summer, families moved upriver, often taking planks from their houses to set up temporary houses, and spent the summer gathering food. Spring and summer were time for gathering native blackberries, huckleberries, and lots of other fresh foods. These were dried and carried home for storage. When the salmon ran upstream, the people would catch as much as they could for smoking and drying. Salmon formed their staple food. They'd use smelt rakes to gather up thousands of fish during the smelt run, and a kind of smelt called eulachon was processed for oil. There were vast trade routes (known to the white settlers later as the "grease trails") involving the trade of eulachon oil with people inland for items that the coastal people couldn't get, such as obsidian for projectile points.

The coastal people also hunted to some extent. Elk, deer, and bear were needed not only for meat, but for skins. The estuaries were full of ducks and other waterbirds that could be eaten, as well as all the different types of clams and other shellfish.

Posted September 1, 2006 3:20 PM by Writerious

More likely that dogs are descended from scavengers, who lived off the trash heaps surrounding primitive villages. Most of 'em would be fearful of people, and would run off or attack when approached by people. However, some would be more human-o-philic, so to speak -- they'd stick around when humans were nearby, and not attack. Those are the ancestors of the current population of dogs.

So what you're saying is that in a little while we should be seeing tame, affectionate, trainable squirrels?

Cool!

Posted September 1, 2006 3:23 PM by S. Dawson

From 60:

What did they do beside fishing/whaling, just out of curiosity?

(Snide PNW specialist voice)
Why should they have to do anything else?

(Real Ethnobotanist/ Pericontact Culture change specialist answer)
Well, given that the cultural zone extends from Monterey Bay to Yakutat, there's a whole lot of answers to this. Extremely sophisticated wood-working and basketry is a hallmark of the entire area, and textiles- woven from everything from twine and duck down to dog undercoat wool- were also common. Prairies were maintained by burning, and those areas were important sources of food, in the form of roots and bulbs of various sorts (most especially camas) as well as a wide variety of berries. There was a strong trade between the coast and the interior in dried foodstuffs and tanned leather (as Lewis and Clark found, drying skins isn't something one takes on lightly in the NW).

In the area of nonmaterial culture, the PNW was typified by elaborate theatrical performances, involving masks and set pieces, all of which formed (and in some cases still form) part the wealth of the household and clan.

For starters.

Posted September 1, 2006 3:24 PM by JESR

Re domesticability of animals:
Given the existing domesticated animals, and historical/archaeological evidence for their domestication back several thousand years, you can say that it was possible to domesticate those species in a pre-modern setting. The question then is -- why those, and not others in the same area, especially if those other animals seem to have similar value or potential use?

I went back and looked at what Diamond was saying (his Chapter 9), and it's perhaps a bit broader than what we've been discussing; at least some of it is characteristics that are not significantly altered by pre-modern breeding. There's what you might call "domesticability," which includes things like disposition towards humans, tendency to panic, and social structure (the latter would be, I think, much more difficult to select for). But there's also ability to breed in captivity: he cites the example of cheetahs, which have been prized enough by nobility and kings to make it worth someone's while to breed them. All efforts to breed cheetahs in captivity failed, probably because they require a multi-day courtship ritual extending over large distances.

He's also more interested in generally "useful" domesticated animals -- that is, those that can provide lots of food and transport. This means the animals should be herbivores or omnivores, and they should grow rapidly. They should also not be so dangerous that you cannot get past the first generation without people getting killed, which rules out (omnivorous) bears, for example.

Posted September 1, 2006 3:24 PM by Peter Erwin

I'm liking the "horses were domesticated by herding them and killing the ones that didn't herd well" hypothesis. Took a class at Berkeley on Central Asian Nomads from an ex-Soviet/Kazahk whose grandmother had been a shaman... She told us how they basically lived off herding three animals, the horse, the camel, and (I think) the goat. Horses were good for breaking through the crusty snow to get at hay in the winter, but that's pretty much all the food horses were for, besides eating... They weren't noble companions. They weren't even ridden, because it would make the meat tough.

I guess this explains why the woolly mammoth wasn't domesticated. It would've been very tough to herd them. Damn shame.

And the "dogs coming from scavenger wolves who decided to help out the human scrapleavers" hypothesis makes sense to me, too. It also implies that we may be on the way to domesticating pigeons, squirrels, and raccoons... If we gave a damn about what they had to offer... :)

Posted September 1, 2006 3:33 PM by Madeline F

Not being an expert myself... trite and stereotypical as it sounds, if someone says PNW indigenous art, I immediately think Totem Poles.

Here's what I have in my bookmarks, I've been working on a x-cultural orientation curriculum/continuing education module for my job.

Eyak/Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian (from Alaska Native Heritage Center)

Sealaska is the regional Native Corporation, and they have sponsored the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

If you have a chance to make it to/through DC before January, the Smithsonian has a PNW exhibit.

and the previously mentioned UBC Museum of Anthropology.

My MS project was on x-cultural communication in rural Alaska, specifically as it relates to ongoing science and engineering projects. I learned enough to know that I don't know enough!

Posted September 1, 2006 3:38 PM by Tania

So what you're saying is that in a little while we should be seeing tame, affectionate, trainable squirrels?

I believe squirrels were kept as pets in colonial America. (Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has a picture of Copley's stepbrother with a pet squirrel --- it happens to be the painting that first brought him to the attention of artists in England). I'm not sure why they ever went out of style...

Posted September 1, 2006 4:00 PM by "Charles Dodgson"

JESR said (#59):
About mixed agriculture as an index of "civilization:"

Again, the anthropologist in me groans at this remnant of Victorian historical speculation. This is probably because I'm a Pacific Northwest Coast specialist, but really: there are other ways to reach the level of security and surplus that can lead to the development of complex cultural institutions. Just because small grain agriculture and the domestication of herd animals for food sources and traction beasts was what allowed the cultures of Eurasia to do it doesn't even mean it was a good idea in the long run, let alone the only way to go.

The issue, as I read Diamond, isn't whether "mixed agriculture + traction beasts" was a "good idea." It's why it arose where it did and developed (or didn't) as it did. It sounds like you're seeing (and objecting to) moral judgements that I don't think are there, at least not in Diamond's work.

Now, whether or not it was "the only way to go" is a more interesting question, in terms of understanding history.[*] And why different regions, or different cultures, went the particular ways they did, and why they didn't go the other (possible) ways, is also interesting.

What are some of those other ways, and where were they practised?

(The disadvantage of Pacific NW-style fishing, if that's what you're alluding to, in terms of historical influence is that it's nowhere near as portable as agriculture + domesticated animals, so it can't spread across whole continents the way the latter can.)

[*] That is, in the scientific sense of trying to explain how things happened, and why. Whether certain developments were "a good idea" or not is also very interesting, but it's a different mode of historical inquiry.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:11 PM by Peter Erwin

"It also implies that we may be on the way to domesticating pigeons, squirrels, and raccoons... If we gave a damn about what they had to offer... :)"

I think it's Aldo Leopold who writes about the impossibility of not domesticating wild turkeys, if you camp in their territory in the south west. Unless it's Edward Abbey.

My current opinion, encouraged by a bunch of Shorthorn cows and an Angus bull standing under the elderly and towering apple trees and trying to bring down fruit by sheer force of voice (and demonstrating by that activity the efficacy of random reinforcement) is that however cattle were domesticated it was a bad idea. No matter how tasty they are.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:14 PM by JESR

"It also implies that we may be on the way to domesticating pigeons, squirrels, and raccoons..."

Ah, but canines are well suited to the role, being highly social, socially adaptable, conform to hierarchies, and naturally do many things (herding, guarding, tracking) that humans find useful.

Raccoons are nasty loners. Squirrels can be tamed quite easily, but what do they have to offer?

As to WHY wolves weren't domesticated directly: The time in which pups can be imprinted is woefully short, and adult wolves are suspicious and touchy. They are wild animals which can be tamed but not domesticated. Early humans would have as much trouble dealing with them as a modern-day human foolish enough to adopt a wolf.

The proto-dog village scavenger, OTOH, would have pups right at the edge of the settlement. The pups would learn how to earn a living -- eating scraps -- in plain view, alongside their relatively laid-back and tolerant parents. It was from this start that breeding for friendliness, and eventually other traits, could begin.

FWIR, the Russian garbage-dump foxes that were bred for tameness were a particularly social fox species. The technique might not work on, say, red foxes.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:18 PM by Stefan Jones

Data points:

A neighbor had a pet raccoon. He was (eventually) litter box trained, and didn't bite family members. When I visited, and "Pappoose" was out, I stood on chairs to keep away from him. He bit me on my foot once, on my back step, when he got out of the house.

My sister took care of a wolf, her landlord's semi-pet. A real good buddy, protective and mellow with friends, but a total coward among strangers. He had to live outside or in the basement, since despite being raised from a pup would never have any truck with housebreaking.

He was also highly protective of his mate, the landlord's rottweiller. (They had a few litters together.) He badly mauled a neighbor's lab who took his turn with the rotty, leading to his getting "snipped" and eventual exile to Idaho, where he escaped and most likely was shot or hit by a car.

Don't adopt wolf pups.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:28 PM by Stefan Jones

debcha (#71) - The idea that the domestication of dogs began with them parasitically/symbiotically living with humans is pretty much the accepted story for cats - they hung out in our granaries and fields and ate mice

According to Desmond Morris, in the book Catwatching, a big breakthrough in cat-domestication was when people figured out that cats actually hunted better when they were well-fed. Intuitively, you'd think the opposite -- that a hungry cat would make a better hunter -- but cats have an instinct for hunting separate from the instinct for food.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:31 PM by Mitch Wagner

One of my main problems with Guns, Germs and Steel is that I found it nearly unreadable. I think it was one of two books in college that I was required to read that I just for the life of me couldn't get through. I thought what he had to say was interesting, but he kept repeating the same points over and over again. Also, I'm glad that someone besides me thought some of his examples sounded rather historically sketchy.

For anyone interested in the environmental impact of pre-colonial Native Americans, The Ecological Indian is actually quite a good book. Much of it is rather controversial for its standpoint that Native Americans weren't all warm-and-fuzzy-sustainable as some people make them out to be, but I found it fascinating and respectful towards those cultures.

Posted September 1, 2006 4:47 PM by Shannon

Elaine and I were listening to Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong on 'books on tape' on the way back from Worldcon and Loewen covered the influence of the Indian plagues in making way for the early European settlers.

A very depressing thing to listen to on a long trip.

Jack

Posted September 1, 2006 4:53 PM by rockycoloradan

IMHO, many urban squirrel populations in the U.S. are semi-domesticated already. They're tame enough that they'll go up to you and beg, and if you're not too threatening, some of them will even let you pet them. The major factors preventing them from being totally domesticated are a) the other domesticated animals we have (cats + dogs), and b) no one's seriously made the effort to isolate a breeding population (so they regularly interbreed with more wild squirrels).

Pigeons have been domesticated repeatedly in the past (remember the passenger pigeon? Probably not.)

As to raccoons, I didn't think they were nasty loners -- I tend to see family groups. However, they aren't a good candidate for (present) domestication, since there's been no selection pressure for tameness. Think. What do you do if you see a group of raccoons by your garbage can? You go out and make a nuisance of yourself. [Only do it if you see a group, because a loner might be rabid. Call Animal Control, or let it go about its business. IANAexpert.] So they've never been selected for tolerance or lack of fear towards humans.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:00 PM by Malthus

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in "The Tribe of the Tiger: Cats and Their Culture" (1994) gives an anthropologist's perspective on feline behavior; such things as the ability of lions to co-exist with pastoralists, if the human population is culturally stable, or new groups of humans don't change "the rules."

(She did a similar volume on canids.)

I don't recall if she mentioned the theory about the importance of people noticing that well-fed cats were better mousers. She gives a lot of examples of stalk-and-pounce as some sort of hard-wired behavior, a craving independent of hunger, and sometimes disconnected from actually hunting and killing.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:07 PM by Ian Myles Slater

Charles Dodgson (#83): (Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has a picture of Copley's stepbrother with a pet squirrel --- it happens to be the painting that first brought him to the attention of artists in England).

Just a minor quibble - it's not a coincidence. Copley painted that portrait specifically to send to European artists, in order to find someone there to work/train with. The furry squirrel, the glass of water, and the highly-polished wood surface were all deliberately included in order to allow him to demonstrate his mastery.

If you're ever in the Boston area, it's worth checking out the painting at the MFA - it's absolutely stunning, and the online version doesn't come close to doing it justice.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:08 PM by debcha

I don't recall if she mentioned the theory about the importance of people noticing that well-fed cats were better mousers. She gives a lot of examples of stalk-and-pounce as some sort of hard-wired behavior, a craving independent of hunger, and sometimes disconnected from actually hunting and killing.

That kind of makes sense: even if stalk-and-pounce is ultimately for the purpose of hunting food, if cats have an impulse to practice it on other occasions, then they'll probably be better at it when they're actually hunting.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:12 PM by Peter Erwin

On Bison footnoting a few things and saving others some searches:

The Texas Bison Company’s Web site answers some frequently-asked questions for people interested in bison. They recommend starting with bison calves:

Start small and start with calves! This is the best advice I got, and I’m passing it on. I guarantee that you will have lessons to learn if you have never worked bison before, and adult bison will not be forgiving. With calves you can get in with them and they will get used to you. Maybe eat out of your hand. They will learn not to fear you and like you, and as they will end up the oldest in your herd, the others will learn from them. I would do this all over again. The more time you spend with them the better. However, there will be a time when you have too many animals to go in the pasture with them, or as they grow up they may start to challenge you. Specifically the bulls. And don’t even think of approaching a cow and a calf!
Besides, if you buy an adult animal, it may have been a cull, and it could’ve been due to a bad temperament: (I once bought an adult female bison and ended up with stitches because I had to dive through a barbed wire fence or risk being gored). As the herd grows and you become experienced, then you may take a risk on buying adult animals.

My herd once went through an open gate and roamed 3 miles. After I found them I shook the range cube bucket and my head female led the herd all the way home. That’s because she knew me since she was a calf, and since I started out with only 3 calves. I had spent a LOT of time with them in the pasture. Now they are teaching the rest of the herd. Expect that at some time your herd may get out. How would you get them back! I suggest adding a gate to every side of your perimeter fencing. Even if it is a fence line shared with your neighbor. It will make it a lot easier to get your bison back home.

Canadian sources say a lot about fencing at:

httpcolonwhackwhackwwwdotagrdotgovdotskdotcawhackdocswhacklivestockwhackbisonwhackproduction_informationwhackfmb398k.asp

Fencing for Bison
Fencing for bison ranching currently varies from upgraded cattle barbed wire fences to six-foot, high-tensile page wire. The wide variety of fence types being used is because, in Saskatchewan, there are no fencing requirements for bison set by regulations. However, no single fencing solution can be applied to all bison ranches. Success of fencing relies upon animal disposition, pasture management and sound fence construction. Animals that continue to be a problem, regardless of management practices, should be culled. Any type of fence can fail if inadequate food and water stress the bison. emphasis added. My observation is that a mature bison bison can walk through most fences and just leaning on the fence post and putting full weight on the fence will take down any fence economical for long runs. Electrical fencing is funny - I've seen full sibs where one animal honored a nothing fence and one animal ignored too much current to use.

Myself I'd like a footnote for #42 the most-hunted species in North America was Bison bison for the ages before the horse - I simply don't believe the great American desert was ever climax forested and by least hypothesis I find natural causes - lightning - sufficient for the ecosystem found. I suspect it was plains for a long time to account for evolutionary adaptations including some of the grasses with tough seeds.

Certainly people do forget the move to horses moved many woodland tribes west and the lack of direct contact between settlers and everybody from the mound builders to the cliff dwellers means the people dropped out of the narrative histories of the English speaking people in North America -

On the relative ease of the hunter gatherer lifestyle - consider Tom Brown starting naked in the New Jersey Pine Barrens compared to an agricultural lifestyle without a steel plow starting naked in North Dakota.

Posted September 1, 2006 5:45 PM by Clark E Myers

debcha: medieval food (without chilis and tomatoes) is not only full of variety and flavour, outside areas like the SCA, most of it is either forgotten or altered so much by the passage of time that it now comes to us not as something old and dull and traditional, but as something unusual and new. They use things we don't think to try together, and as often as not, they work, and the result is the kind of "I never would have envisioned that!" you get in fusion restaurants or some haut cuisine.

These were people who were not only highly creative, but had to be so while following rigorous seasonal limitations. If anything, it meant they ahd to be more creative.

(also, of course, the recipes that lasted are popular ones, those for high special occasions, and ones mostly done by the wealthy, who, though still trapped by seasonal availability, had more available and less concern with cost. As with many old things, the good ones or the popular ones survive, the crud is long lost.)

Posted September 1, 2006 6:04 PM by Lenora Rose

Oh, thank goodness I'm not the only one who can't get through Jared Diamond without wanting to toss the book at the wall (for more than one reason). I want to like him, I really do. But.

I'll definitely have to check out 1491.

For the record, Diamond isn't where I learned the theories about not all animals being domesticatable; I learned that from Professor Lambert-Karlovsky in a class a few years back, and IIRC he presented several different sources regarding that piece of information.

Random note: it's tempting to talk about the plants and animals domesticated in the Americas, as if it's one set of critters that everyone had access to -- but that wasn't actually the case. The Americas are huge, and organisms' habitable ranges are usually limited. So the Mi'cmaq up in Maritime Canada didn't have llamas, and the Toltecs didn't have buffalo....

In conclusion, anyone who thinks squirrels haven't been domesticated clearly hasn't been to Cambridge, where the squirrels are fat, sassy, and frankly creep me out.

Posted September 1, 2006 6:30 PM by G. Jules

And there's some medieval food which survived for obvious reasons. I have a 14th c recipe of peeling and coring apples, cutting them in sliced, battering and deep-frying them...apple donut, anyone? I suddenly realised why they're shaped the way they are.

Posted September 1, 2006 6:40 PM by lalouve

Jeffery Smith,

Almost 100 post later, I wanted to thank you for alerting me to Widdershins by Charles de Lint. I hadn't realized it was out yet.

Posted September 1, 2006 6:57 PM by Kayjay

"Any type of fence can fail"

Nothing needs added beyond that; it's as true of cattle as of bison, and to the list of stimuli for breachiness please add curiosity and pure cussedness.

Sorry. It's been one of those weeks here.

Posted September 1, 2006 7:13 PM by JESR

On the subject of domesticable animals, I am wondering about mongooses. They are said to be very easy to tame, were domesticated in Ancient Egypt, and are kept as pets in India to keep the house free of snakes and other vermin. (This is, of course, famous from the Kipling story). I haven't, from a cursory look on the web, been able to find out much more about mongoose domestication practices, so I'm not sure whether they're bred in captivity and, if so, whether tame ones have physical or behavioural differences from the wild type.

Anyway, what I'm wondering is: with two vermin-killing species filling a similar niche, why did the Ancient Egyptians value cats so much more highly, and why didn't mongooses catch on in Europe the way that cats, another Egyptian import, did? Why isn't there a Mongoose Fanciers Society and a multi-million dollar industry in mongoose food and accessories? Why doesn't our picture of domestic bliss include a mongoose curled in front of the fire?

(Disclaimer: I am actually very fond of cats, and am not necessarily putting this forward as a preferable scenario. I have never met a mongoose, so I cannot comment on their personal qualities).

Posted September 1, 2006 8:19 PM by Jenny

#101 Jenny, here's a mongoose in my back yard. He or one or more of the same species hangs out under our house occasionally, then heads for the hedge. The neighbor has a pigeoncote, but I've never heard him grumble about losing the birds or their eggs.

Remembering Rikki-tikki-tavi, I get nervous about our 13-year-old Pointer going out in the yard when the mongoose is about. So far, no ructions, but...

Posted September 1, 2006 8:35 PM by Linkmeister

Oh, and as to personal qualities of mongoose, one of the cuter things I have ever seen was one of these guys lying on his back on our brick walkway, holding an avocado on his belly with his head partially inside it. (The avocado tree overhangs the hedge mentioned in #102.)

He looked like he'd seen the classic otter picture and was doing his best to emulate it.

Posted September 1, 2006 8:38 PM by Linkmeister