Animal Domestication

Well put. It's generally acknowledged that dogs were not "domesticated" by humans but voluntarily formed the world's first multi-species community. I maintain that this remarkable innovation was a key step in our advance toward civilization.

At the time, humans were a pack-social species like most of the other Great Apes, our closest cousins. But unlike gorillas and chimpanzees who can graze on leaves and digest the cellulose for its food value, we are the only carnivorous ape and we rely on predation for our food supply. This means a pre-agricultural Stone Age human tribe required a rather large hunting territory--so large that we couldn't build permanent settlements but had to be nomads, following the game.

Every tribe had to jealously guard its territory, because a pre-agricultural "economy" produces virtually no surplus food, and during a bad year we had nothing to share. Humans were like other pack-hunting predators, such as lions, regarding other tribes with suspicion and hostility.

One of those other pack-hunting predators was the wolf. In a remarkable event, a curious and tolerant pack of wolves experimented with moving closer to the camp of a curious and tolerant tribe of humans. They could see that our campground was littered with perfectly edible food, and we could see that the other more aggressive predators left our camp alone when it was guarded by wolves with their keen night vision.

Surely this did not go smoothly as some of the wolves regarded human children as food and some of the humans could not overcome their instinctive panic at the proximity of a large animal with both eyes in front of its face. But over the centuries the wolves with a compatible temperament became part of our tribe and we discovered that our complementary hunting skills brought down more game than the two packs could bring down separately.

This would be remarkable enough: voluntary cooperation between two species in the same ecological niche. But I suggest that our learning to rely on and care for pack-mates who we couldn't even talk to planted the idea that perhaps we could somehow learn to cooperate with the other packs of humans, and make life sweeter for everyone.

Isn't it curious that after being nomadic pack-social hunter-gatherers for millions of years, a mere three or four thousand years after dogs began to live with us, we invented-agriculture-built-permanent-settlements-lived-in-communities-with-people-we-hadn't-grown-up-with-and-started-on-our-way-to-building-civilization?

I hyphenated that because on the scale of human history up to that point it really did happen at almost blinding speed. The first dogs 14KYA, the first cultivated plants 12KYA, the first city 10KYA.

So yes, it's not facetious to say that dogs "domesticated" us.

To be fair, other animals self-domesticated. Cats started hanging around our granaries because they were full of tasty rodents. Earlier, pigs and goats had wandered into our camps like the dogs, cleaning up the garbage. Unfortunately the relationship didn't end up so well for them. But that's rare. Animal husbandry is a key technology and we had to invent it in order to domesticate cattle, sheep, chickens, horses, camels, ducks, llamas, elephants, turkeys, rabbits, geese, etc.

That was a good read, thanks. Unfortunately you have to be a member to get past the summary of Morey's article. I'm interested in the controversy over the time of self-domestication of wolves/dogs. I've seen the DNA research that puts it much earlier, but apparently it's not convincing. The first DNA analysis put it at around 14KYA in what is now China, and the original pack of wolves whose more adventurous members moved into the human camp are still there so the DNA comparison is easy. This only happened once; all dogs are descended from that one pack. Humans took their dogs with them everywhere and traded them with other tribes. This reinforces the premise that animal husbandry had not yet been invented and no one yet knew how to "domesticate" and captive-breed any animal. (Animal husbandry and farming--plant cultivation--are the two technologies that comprise the Agricultural Revolution.)

You're behind the DNA information curve. Dogs are wolves. They've been reclassified taxonomically as Canis lupus familiaris. They have enough differences to qualify as a separate subspecies: smaller brains to adapt to the lower-protein diet of a scavenger, slightly different teeth less well-suited for quickly ripping the flesh off a kill before the larger carnivores move in, and a much broader social instinct for forming larger packs with (now) many different species of pack mates.

BTW, dingos turn out to be plain old dogs. Of course there were no wolves in Australia and they did not come with the Aborigines in 50KYA, long before domestication. They were brought over by explorers from Asia and the islands around 5KYA and they really liked the place.

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Coyotes are Canis latrans, a distinct but closely related species. They have a tractable social instinct, able to hunt in packs or scavenge singly or in pairs, and they crossbreed readily with both domestic dogs and feral wolves. Their success in North America is due to their willingness to be camp-followers and adapt first to Indian settlements and then to civilization, like raccoons, skunks, possums and even bears. In Los Angeles they've become diurnal and learned to walk with their tails held high so they pass for dogs. You might see one on a Pasadena street at high noon, waiting for the traffic light.

Hyenas are not canids. They are a separate family of carnivores, but they belong to the clade that includes the cats. (Most carnivore families such as bears and weasels are in the dog clade.)

 

I think it was pretty clearly labeled as opinion:

We can't all be the Royal Curmudgeon, since you hold that office. Some of us have to take this place seriously and offer hypotheses for discussion, or you wouldn't have anything to play your cranky games with.

Their hunting and gathering territories were so large that in most cases they could not cover them from a base camp. This is why very few permanent settlements were created, which would have given them the opportunity to develop technologies that require heavy tools and raw materials. In general, only the Mesolithic folk who discovered a great year-round place for fishing were able to settle down and develop a Neolithic lifestyle before the Agricultural Revolution.

AFAIK the earliest evidence of humans and dogs sharing gravesites goes back to about 11KYA. I believe the article Skinwalker linked to provided some data on the subject.

I think you're generalizing from the idyllic conditions the Europeans discovered in North America. Humans have only lived in the New World for a fraction of the time we've had to take over Eurasia, so the population density was lower and they had not had enough time to deplete the resources. Only where the Olmecs and Incas had developed civilizations did they begin to encounter scarcity, and even the Incas hadn't been around long enough to have as much of an impact as the Mesoamericans.

There were famines in the Paleolithic Era. One of them occurred at the time of the first migration out of Africa, leading to the speculative hypothesis (are you happy Max?) that the Homo sapiens diaspora was a desperate search for food.

The American colonists had the same experience as the Paleoindian migrants across Beringia, fast-forwarded to the next Paradigm Shift. They found a land where civilization had not been invented, so the natural resources had not been depleted. We think it's our rugged character and our democratic ideals that made America great, but it might have been the humble fact that we had more coal, wood, metal ore and fertile topsoil per capita than the Europeans and Asians.

As I already pointed out, the aboriginal North Americans lived in a land of plenty because they hadn't been there long enough to increase their population and stress the resources. They didn't need working dogs and they had coyotes to do the scavenging. The very reason they are so well "documented" is that some of them were still living in the Stone Age when photography was invented.

Edit: Use of the dog travois for hauling is well-documented among the aboriginal North Americans. However, I have not been able to determine whether this use of dogs as beasts of burden was their own idea or something they learned from the Europeans. It seems unlikely to be a European teaching since they had the wheel and had not used the travois for millennia. On the other hand, seeing a horse pulling a cart could have inspired the Indians to invent the travois. (A travois is a triangular sledge that is supported at the front edge and tapers to a point which drags on the ground. It's obviously only suitable for fairly level, unobstructed ground.)

No, Mister Wise-Ass. I mean "cats" as in Felis sylvestris, the only species of feline that was domesticated until recent work with ocelots and African jungle cats. They're solitary hunters of small game and the erection of granaries caused a spike in the rodent population, a match made in heaven. Or to be precise, in Egypt. The earliest evidence of cats hanging around human habitation is found in Egypt and indeed the subspecies of cat that is the gene pool of all domestic cats is Felis sylvestris lybicus, the wild cat of North Africa. The self-domestication of cats occurred after the founding of civilization so we have better archeological evidence than we have for dogs.

At what time? Both species are millions of years old. This website says that goats were one of the earliest domesticated food animals, going back to 10-11KYA, the dawn of agriculture. It doesn't talk about how they first found their way into our camps, but they are brazen scavengers. It's reasonable to hypothesize that the first experiments in animal husbandry were performed on animals who were relatively content to live in proximity to humans, rather than those we had to go out and capture, kicking and screaming.

No they didn't, Max. Mesoamerican civilization had not extended north of the Rio Grande by the time the Christian armies arrived and destroyed it. There were tribes in what is now the USA that had begun cultivating crops--farming, one of the two technologies that comprise agriculture--and this allowed them to establish permanent villages and peaceful trading networks. This puts them at the cusp of the Neolithic Era--the Late Stone Age. But they still had to hunt down their protein; the largest domesticated animal their attempts at animal husbandry (the other half of agriculture) had achieved was the turkey. They did not have civilization, "the building of cities," although the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and the ruins of a few other experiments show that the idea had occurred to them before they had the other technologies--or perhaps the luck--to make a go of it.

The order Carnivora is divided into two suborders, Caniformia and Feliformia. The caniforms include the families of dogs, bears, raccoons, skunks, pinnipeds, pandas and mustelids (weasels, ferrets, otters, etc.). The feliforms are a much smaller clade, including only cats, civets, mongooses and hyenas. So you're right about the hyenas, cats and mongooses, but the weasels belong in the other suborder with the dogs.

* * * * Note from the Linguistics Moderator * * * *
"Mongeese" is not listed as an acceptable plural of "mongoose."