While We Wait: Part 4

[Abaddon]

Ptsh that was a post and a half. All I will add here to conclude it is that rather obviously, idea's about animal evolution/domestication continue to change, and one can assume Pr. Diamond is not the only person to have an opinion on the matter, nor is it a universal one.

 

[Symphony D.]

Jeff Corwin was just on Fox News and said Elephants were domesticated. He is an animal expert...

Congratulations, we have another idiot who doesn't know the difference between "tame," and "domesticated."

I believe it is moot, as we domesticate to fill a need, we perhaps would have domesticated something else to provide us with milk, or eggs, etc.. but we only need so many different niches to be filled to supply our diet

No. Humans are omnivores. They will eat whatever they deem edible. There is no end to the niches we can have, it's simply a question of how many we can fill.

Just because one person has the wim to have such an animal, it bears no relation that humans are going to as a collective try and breed such animals, such would the infrequency of keeping a pet be, I can fully see how few would become domesticated. There has to be a strong desire/need to domesticate something, and a "pet" does not supply that.

Cheetahs were tamed by the thousands. Asian elephants by the hundreds to thousands. These others, during the peak, likely by the hundreds. That's a sufficient population to begin to attempt domestication, and domestication does start at a minimal level. You yourself just said that domestication is not a coordinated effort. Therefore it will always begin with random, low-intensity incidents--pets.

So now you've gone and contradicted yourself to boot. Which is it? It's organized, or it isn't? Make up your mind.

And despite that, it hasn't worked. Leading to:

What I am essentially saying is that some animals were more suitable for domestication, and once they were.. where was the drive to domesticate others? Gone! that is the main reason there is not innumeral domesticated animals. NOT at the foremost the difficulty in doing so, or unsuitability.

You're totally right, Abaddon. Why would anyone possibly want more meat, or milk, or skins, or eggs? Humans are so gosh-darn egalitarian and totally non-materialistic... and by golly, everybody wants the same things! Not variety, no!

So when the creature kills its handlers repeatedly, that isn't a problem. When it beats itself to death against its confines because it can't handle enclosed spaces, that isn't a problem. When it absolutely refuses to mate while in captivity, that isn't a problem. When its social structure is that of a loner, and it physically cannot recognize a superior entity and work with it, that isn't a problem.

None of these completely unsolvable issues are problems whatsoever. How could I be so blind.

No, other animals that do exist on this planet. The ones that sit there now, yet undomesticated. My sentence obviously means this.. are oyu really stooping as to try and misunderstand me?

I don't have to, since you don't seem to recognize that certain attributes make working with an animal virtually impossible, which is the real reason they weren't domesticated. There is no such thing as "too much" when humanity is involved. Which is why we have tried--and failed--to domesticate just about everything on the planet.

It doesn't work because it doesn't work, not because we haven't tried.

There exist animals that potentially could have been domesticated had there been the incination and effort/pressue.

No, there aren't. There was this thing called the Ice Age. You might have heard of it. Killed off the vast majority of megafauna in North America--including Horses.

Why do you have to change the animal in any way, and stop being fixated on the elephant! I mean choose a different animal to the elephant, and take the leap of faith that this time round (in the alt) humans attempted to domesticate animal X.

CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE FINALLY GRASPED MY ARGUMENT. WE HAVE.

Name an animal. It's been tried. It probably failed.

So the only way it works, for an alternate group of people in an alternate history, is if the animal is different, because if it's the same, you'll get the same result. Success is dependent upon the animal, not the people trying to domesticate it. If you don't change the animal, guess what? Same result: failure.

I meant though our knowledge, not our technologies. What I meant was simply to provide the pressure to result in a domestication. Once man had the basic needs through the first few domestications.. what need was there to expand upon it?

A COMPLETE ONE.

Maybe you're unaware of this but for most of history livestock has been exceptionally expensive and meat has been a luxury for the rich. So, if you could figure out how to domesticate all those other animals why, you'd be able to grow food in new ecological niches, have a greater and more flexible variety of resources, and generally have a better standard of living.

Or, as I said, nobody ever chose to live in squalor and deprivation by not trying to figure out how to use something. Leading us to...

Why does not domesticating something equal death? Many groups of humans did very well without domesticating animals.

WRONG! Most of them were conquered by the Europeans and died from a hideous cocktail of diseases that were carried along by them. More food yields more people. More people yields a need for centralized states. Centralized states yield an environment in which technology develops, along with disease resistance.

All the people who didn't have animals basically got screwed, and although human tribal societies have their perks, they are prone to ecological failure and also have problems when confronted by technologically advanced neighbors. There's a reason the West rules the world, and it starts with food, plant and animal. Those who didn't have the plants needed the animals, and more often than not, they didn't get them.

-----

The crux of your argument appears to revolve around the idea humans are mysteriously not greedy, and were for some reason or another contented with the animals they did domesticate, and so never bothered with any others.

Despite all the evidence that they did. And the fact that humans are never content at settling for anything unless they absolutely have to.

Pretty awesome line of reasoning there, dude. What's the name of the university you went to? I increasingly want to see this diploma.

 

[Abaddon]

Symphony D. your main method of attack seems to be to misdirect, misquote and above all outright cheat. Why do you always cut my quotes up and then attack them out of context? Why not answer as I do with everything included?

(This asside i will try and address the points you "raised" in the above post.. this will take a while again)

 

[Symphony D.]

Well gee Abaddon, as I see it, I quoted you in discrete blocks just like you did me. Now, if that's cutting up your remarks and misinterpreting them, I guess you must be guilty of it too.

You can see the summary at the end of my last post.

 

[Abaddon]

Except I didn't.
I either included nothing but reference to a comment, or posted it whole.
I also posted it all in the order which you posted it.

You miss sentances out here and there, re-arrange thing etc.


An to be quick (do we need to dig so deep each time?) I will answer your summary.

YES a human is greedy.
YES a human wants more.

A human wants more MILK for example.

Will he:
A, Selectively breed the cow which already produces a reasonable amount of milk
B, Try and domesticate the squirrel, since hey, its another source of milk!


Yes my example is a silly one, not much unlike yours above.. but it outlines in nice bold and flashy letters what I am trying to say:

Once we had domesticated the basics, its was easier to breed them, then to domesticate others.

An from that domestication very much slowed down (with few exceptions of course [there always are])

 

[Symphony D.]

You miss sentances out here and there, re-arrange thing etc.

Oh yes, because it's so dreadfully hard for the viewing audience to go back and read your remarks and heaven forbid that I should attempt to reorder my points to structure them in a logical fashion! Heresy!

Look, I'm cutting out your sentences again! HAX!

Once we had domesticated the basics, its was easier to breed them, then to domesticate others.

And we tried anyway, for hundreds to thousands of years, to varying degrees, on a wide number of species, in a wide number of areas. So, what does this empirical and historical evidence of effort to domesticate after having secured the Major Nine tell us? Hrm, maybe that despite having dependable, domesticated sources, we weren't satisfied, and attempted to domesticate further species anyway?

And if we weren't satisfied, and tried, what prevented us from having similar success? Oh, right, problems with the animals. The very thing you keep denying as being a possible source of conflict. Again, the evidence is right there, staring you in the face, and you keep turning your back on it. The efforts were made. They didn't half-assedly try and waste their resources for nothing. The effort to domesticate was not the fault, compatability with the animals was.

 

[Abaddon]

I have not denied it.. you pulled that one out of context as well. What I am saying is that it is NOT the MAIN reason.

I propose that it is a lack of need that is the forerunner.

Yes obviously a cheetah etc is a ridiculus example.. why the hell would we ever need to domesticate such a thing.

Yet.. is a fox pretty unreasonable creature.. bet you wouldn't want to cuddle a wild one? Yet we domestiated that didn't we? In Soviet Russia indeed.. those curaazy coms!


Also, who is the royal "we" you keep banging on about? Why historical data is there of all these failed attempts? Or are you including the odd wacko that tried to acclimatize piranah, or snuggle up with a sloth?

 

[das]

Okay, Abbadon, what is it exactly that you wanted prehistorical humans to domesticate? I think I missed that.

 

[Abaddon]

Okay, Abbadon, what is it exactly that you wanted prehistorical humans to domesticate? I think I missed that.

Possible Daas because I didn't.

 

[sp1023]

Isn't the Soviet symbol a bear? Hey yall.

 

[Abaddon]

It is.... so what?

 

[Symphony D.]

Also, who is the royal "we" you keep banging on about? Why historical data is there of all these failed attempts? Or are you including the odd wacko that tried to acclimatize piranah, or snuggle up with a sloth?

For your benefit, I'm going to go through this slowly, since apparently otherwise I'm miscontextualizing you.

1. I put forward this quote of Diamond:

A second type of evidence for the same interpretation comes from pets. Keeping wild animals as pets, and taming them, constitute an initial stage in domestication. But pets have been reported from virtually all the traditional human societies on all continents. The variety of wild animals thus tamed is far greater than the variety eventually domesticated, and includes some species that we would scarcely have imagined as pets.

For example, in the New Guinea villages where I work, I often see people with pet kangaroos, possums, and birds ranging from flycatchers to ospreys. Most of these captives are eventually eaten, though some are kept just as pets. New Guineans even regularly capture chicks of wild cassowaries (an ostrich-like large, flightless bird) and raise them to eat as a delicacy--even though captive adult cassowaries are extremely dangerous and now and then disembowel village people. Some Asian peoples team eagles for use in hunting, although those powerful pets have also been known on occasion to kill their human handlers. Ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, and modern Indians, tamed cheetahs for use in hunting. Paintings made by ancient Egyptians show that they further tamed (not surprisingly) hoofed mammals such as gazelles and hartebeests, birds such as cranes, more surprisingly giraffes (which can be dangerous), and most astonishingly hyenas. African elephants were tamed in Roman times despite the obvious danger, and Asian elephants are still being tamed today. Perhaps the most unlikely pet is the European brown bear (the same species as the American grizzly bear), which the Ainu people of Japan regularly captured as young animals, tamed, and reared to kill and eat in a ritual ceremony.

Thus, many wild animal species reached the first stage in the sequence of animal-human relations leading to domestication, but only a few emerged at the other end of that sequence as domestic animals. Over a century ago, the British scientist Francis Galton summarized this discrepancy succinctly: "It would appear that every wild animal has had its change of being domesticated, that [a] few .... were domesticated long ago, but that the large remainder, who failed sometimes in only one small particular, are destined to perpetual wilderness."

2. You responded:

Pets are a wim, a fancy. Sometimes simply tamed from the wild, others a now readily domesticated animal.. hamster? Corn snake etc?
Your quote goes to say how some pets are ridiculus..Hyenas, giraffes etc. Just because one person has the wim to have such an animal, it bears no relation that humans are going to as a collective try and breed such animals, such would the infrequency of keeping a pet be, I can fully see how few would become domesticated. There has to be a strong desire/need to domesticate something, and a "pet" does not supply that. Thus we have (by classification) many more pets than domesticated animals.

3. I responded:

Cheetahs were tamed by the thousands. Asian elephants by the hundreds to thousands. These others, during the peak, likely by the hundreds. That's a sufficient population to begin to attempt domestication, and domestication does start at a minimal level. You yourself just said that domestication is not a coordinated effort. Therefore it will always begin with random, low-intensity incidents--pets.

So now you've gone and contradicted yourself to boot. Which is it? It's organized, or it isn't? Make up your mind.

And despite that, it hasn't worked. Leading to:

4. I was referring to this post of yours, when I stated you were contradicting yourself:

When we domesticated animals we weren't trying to domesticate them. We did it without planning, merely through selective process.

Now, my argument:

A. We have a long and detailed history of attempting to utilize a wide variety of megafauna as pets and food sources, often taming them in the process, as per (1).
B. (1) postulates that this is the initial process of domestication--taming is a prelude.
C. (2) by you is a direct refutation of (B), and you claim that the taming process is more or less irrelevent to domestication.
D. (4) by you is an affirmation that no conscious desire to domesticate was in place and that it was an organic process.
E. (3) by me is a statement that your arguments (2/C) and (4/D) are in direct contradiction with one another. If there is no conscious will behind domestication, it must begin with relatively innocuous, inane, and small-scale attempts at utilizing animals productively. This is precisely what (1/A) postulates.
F. By (4), you agree with (1). By (2), you disagree with (1)
G. If you stand by (4) and agree with (1) then you must acknowledge that the initial passes at domesticating a wide variety of animals were made, because pets and taming are the initial step of the domestication process. However, you are conflicting yourself with statement (2), as noted in (F).

So, which is it? Is domestication planned or not? If it isn't, it needs to start somewhere at a small-scale, and that is pets and taming, which you later refuted. And pets and taming have been done for an extremely large variety of animals. Most of them never progressed beyond it, because there are a variety of factors that are not conducive to allowing such progression.

QED: the first steps of the process were tried, and the process went no further, ergo: the fault for failure rests with the animal not passing the procress, not with humanity never trying the process to begin with, which is what you conjecture in several posts.

The question is: which of your own statements do you actually believe? Because if you're sticking with (4), you can't disagree with the premise that the animals were not compatible with domesticity.

 

[Abaddon]

~snap edit~ will change this

 

[Symphony D.]

Just because something became a pet, doesn't have to mean we were wanting to domesticate it.

Nor does it mean that the animals that wound up domesticated were selected with the intent of doing so either. It just happened that they were domesticated because they were--taadaa--well-conditioned for it, whereas the others weren't, and therefore didn't make it.

An 4 (me) i was refering to the initial domestication, dog.

So there was a giant plan to convert camels, horses, pigs, chickens, etc? Yes or no?

 

[Abaddon]

Nor does it mean that the animals that wound up domesticated were selected with the intent of doing so either. It just happened that they were because they were--taadaa--well-conditioned for it, whereas the others weren't, and therefore didn't make it.

STOP THE PRESS!!!

Symphony D. claims NOT ALL ANiMALS ARE THE SAME!!!

 

[Symphony D.]

STOP THE PRESS!!!

Symphony D. claims NOT ALL ANiMALS ARE THE SAME!!!

And you're the one saying every animal can be domesticated.

If the main cause is supposedly:

I propose that it is a lack of need that is the forerunner.

A lack of need, how is that the differences between animals is the chief deciding factor?

Oh, because YOU'RE WRONG.

 

[Abaddon]

Why would you need to domesticate an animal ill suited to it?

 

[Symphony D.]

Why would you need to domesticate an animal ill suited to it?

Assuming you're experimenting with it to begin with in ignorance, in such a case the failure to domesticate is a fault of the flaws in the animal, not as a result of not having a need for it or trying to. Congratulations, you have just agreed with me.

Thank you for wasting several hours of everyone's time. This has I'm sure been very educational for those watching.

 

[Abaddon]

Not quite, perhaps my punctuation was amis.

If you already had an animal that was domesticated, why would you bother to expend the extra effort in breeding out the undesirable traits in a "difficult" animal?

People do give up on experients, doesnt mean the experiment couldn't work.

 

[Symphony D.]

Not quite, perhaps my punctuation was amis.

If you already had an animal that was domesticated, why would you bother to expend the extra effort in breeding out the undesirable traits in a "difficult" animal?

People do give up on experients, doesnt mean the experiment couldn't work.

Dog: 10,000 BC (Southwest Asia, China, North America)
Sheep: 8,000 BC (Southwest Asia)
Goat: 8,000 BC (Southwest Asia)
Pig: 8,000 BC (Southwest Asia)
Cow: 6,000 BC (Southwest Asia)
Horse: 4,000 BC (Ukraine)
Donkey, 4,000 BC (Egypt)
Water Buffalo: 4,000 BC (China?)
Llama / Alpaca: 3,500 BC (Andes)
Bactrian Camel: 2,500 BC (Central Asia)
Arabian Camel: 2,500 BC (Arabia)

Why did they bother to domesticate the pig (which will go feral inside of two weeks if it escapes) when they had the much simpler Sheep and Goat? Why, with the Sheep, Goat and Pig already having spread and become ubiquitous in Eurasia, would they adopt the Cow? Why, with all of these in Egypt, by the time it was domesticated, would they bother with the notoriously temperamental Donkey? Why, having both the Donkey and the Horse, would they bother with the equally feisty Camels?

Because they were trying everything. Just like some crazy genius in China figured out grafting to get apple trees to work, and somebody kept eating almonds until they found ones that didn't almost kill them through cyanide poisoning and were relatively only somewhat bitter.

Because people are always trying to exploit any advantages. People didn't labor for several thousand years on Pigs, Donkeys, and Camels, only to throw up their hands in defeat the moment a Hyena got testy.