Re:Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts...
by improbable22 on Sunday May 06, 2018 @03:58PM
(#17008167)
The problem with this argument is that we know what happened when humans met trusting animals: we ate them to extinction. So probably the horse’s ancestors were pretty fierce.
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Re:Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts...
by mannykannot on Sunday May 06, 2018 @05:19PM
(#17008610)
That issue is addressed by the co-evolution clause, which posits that the ancestors of modern Zebras underwent selective pressure for hostility and avoidance towards the ancestors of modern humans as the latter became more dangerous. (Note that the use of 'ancestor' here does not assume any position on whether these ancestors were a different species than their current descendants.)
Re:Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts...
by improbable22 on Sunday May 06, 2018 @05:59PM
(#17008823)
I get that. It explains why the dodo was fearless, and all the american animals.
We ate all of them when we showed up, in the american case c. 10000BC, long before iron weapons.
My point is that if the wild horses we first met were similarly tame, then surely we would have eaten them too. We didn’t. So probably they weren’t.
So that can’t be what stopped us domesticating african animals.
Re:Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts...
by mannykannot on Monday May 07, 2018 @10:05AM
(#17012796)
Maybe what made Asian horses somewhat wary of Homo Sapiens when they showed up was their experience with previous migrations of hominids (Homo Erectus, Denisovans, Neanderthals). This would assume that these predecessors were less dangerous to horses than were the early humans in America, possibly because they were less widely or more thinly spread, or dispersed more slowly.
Re:Wild Horses Can’t be Broken: Zebra Domestication Attempts...
by jkuria on Sunday May 06, 2018 @05:06PM
(#17008546)
I believe Jared Diamond answers this question in Guns, Germs and Steel. Africans didn't have iron tools and were not as effective hunters, so the animals had a much longer time to adapt against their predators.