The Asiatic elephant was never domesticated. They've been capturing wild ones and training them to work for a long time, but there's never been a prolonged breeding program using selective breeding to modify them from the wild version.
This is am important distinction. Many people don't understand the difference between domesticating and taming. Many animals that have never been domesticated, like the elephant, have nevertheless been tamed in vast numbers and trained to assist us with various tasks. These trained animals have had important historical significance (Hannibal crossing the alps, anyone?) but it does not change the fact that due to resistance to captive breeding and other factors, we have never successfully adapted elephants (and many other easily tamed species), to meet our needs and they cannot accurately be called domesticated animals.
The same thing is true with many plants that remain unadapted in modern times despite, in some cases, our best efforts. Acorns have been an important part of many cultures diets, and even though many of these cultures did develop or acquire agriculture - which is really just the systematic process of husbanding domesticated plants - there remains no such thing as a domesticated oak tree.
Wolves adapted naturally (natural selection) to live in a sort of symbiosis with humans a long time before they were domesticated (when WE started selectively breeding them for certain traits). There is genetic evidence that the wolves that were later domesticated diverged from the general wolf population as much as 60,000 years ago.
It is also important to note that although the actions of humans that exerted adaptive pressure on the wolf population were not
consciously undertaken by humans in order to achieve a better result (friendlier wolves), this is still an important part of the domestication process.
Again, lets look at plants. Early hunter-gatherers would be more or less nomadic depending on local availability of gatherable foodstuffs and habits of huntable animals in their environment. Imagine a group living in the fertile crescent 13,000 years ago that, due to favorable conditions, would live in the same place for more than half of the year and return to the same permanent/semipermanent living place every year. This site is near some hills which are overgrown with the wild ancestor of wheat. These humans would harvest the seeds to eat to supplement their diet during the part of the year when the wheat ripens. Due to lacking adequate storage and preservation techniques, some of this wheat would sprout in storage and be discarded as unsuitable for eating. Although the food is ruined from a human consumption standpoint, it is still a perfectly viable organism and would grow in abundance around the nearby location of disposal.
Now, these humans cannot possibly harvest all the wild wheat growing in the area, so they prioritize harvesting the most desirable specimens (i.e. those with the largest seeds) as a matter of efficiency. They also necessarily start harvesting early-ripening wheat before any other wheat, and collect more of the wheat that stays ripe on the stalk for longer than other stalks. The effect of this is that the new wheat fields around the sites where these humans live, formed by discarding sprouting specimens and even defecating unchewed specimens (most seeds can survive this, or even depend on it for those spread by birds) contain primarily the descendants of plants that had qualities desirable to the humans harvesting them - large seeds, early ripening cycle, longer harvesting opportunity. Even though the humans were just doing what seemed best at the time when harvesting this wheat and discarding the portion they could not prevent from sprouting, they were having a selective effect on the inherited qualities of the nearby wheat population. Essentially, without even knowing it, and aided by the process of natural selection, humans started to domesticate wheat unintentionally, which eased the transition to agriculture as a primary means of producing calories.
Molybdeus, I highly recommend you read Guns, Germs, & Steal.
Especially the chapter Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle.
Every single point you bring up is addressed there, and trying to paraphrase it would be a disservice.
I agree with your book recommendation, but disagree with you assertion that paraphrasing it (as I have done with other sections above) would be a disservice, whether out of a fear of unintentionally perpetuating inaccurate information or somehow "stealing credit" for another's ideas. If I took anything from that book it is that you can't stop the spread of beneficial ideas.
If you are anything like me, reading that book re-invigorated your interest in playing Civilization. Although it highlights some of the more absurd departures from realism present in the game, it succinctly summarizes the fascinating nature of the progress of human development, and in particular the eventual dominance of a few cultures (Europeans) over many others, which is in turn the focus and appeal of the game.
