Don't Biatch Conservatives

choff · Post by **choff** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 1:39 am

The arguement put forth in Guns Germs Steel is that the actual number of domesticateable farm animals is very small worldwide, only about 15, and almost none of these are native to the America's. The Indians migrated from Asia to North America long before animal domestication ever took place.

The migration of domestic animals and agriculture was easily facilitated across the Asian continent on the East/West route where the climate was the same. Contrast with the Americas where the climate varies widely travelling from North to South America across the Equator.

In modern times the only new animal to be successfully domesticated is the Hamster.

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 1:40 am

To be fair, some 90% or so of the native population was killed by illnesses imported by the Europeans. That kinda made it easier for the conquerors... It is true though that the Europeans were technologically far more advanced.

choff · Post by **choff** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 2:18 am

Jared Diamond in Guns Germs Steel makes the claim that because we had all the farm animals and crops, we had the free time to develop the technology before the rest of the world. We developed immunity to the domestic animal diseases that killed indians. Because Europe's landscape is so rough it prevents a single state from forming, and the competition between the nations spurs innovation.

If the Medieval Warm Period had just lasted a little longer for the Greenland Vikings to aquire guns, the history of North America might have turned out differently. The Viking Greenland settlements lasted at least until 1408, less than 90 years before Columbus, though North America suffered under the Mini Ice Age along with the Vikings.

GIThruster · Post by **GIThruster** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 2:44 am

Well that's an interesting theory. Guess I'll need to pick up the book.

Skippy, there were a very small number of diseases that killed native Americans from their contact with Europeans. The very worst of these was certainly smallpox which is only carried by humans, and during the Indian wars, it is true germ warfare was used to slaughter large numbers. There are the stories of blankets being deliberately infected with the virus, etc. We don't know much because no one kept accurate records of this, and all deaths do to infectious diseases are broadly estimated between 1 and 18 million. Your 90% figure is based on conjecture as no one really knows how many died or precisely from what. But even given the high side, 18 million, that is very low compared to something like the Black Death that killed more than 450 million.

I am not buying the animal domestication argument as I said: no one ever bothered to domesticate the peccaries otherwise known as Javelina native to North America and by virtue of their much smaller size than other species of pig, they would have been easier to domesticate. There are all the various sorts of wild goats and sheep that were never domesticated, and Native American domestication of the dog is pretty pathetic by the standards of Europe and Asia. In Africa they domesticate antelope and North America is full of them. Wild Turkeys can be chased down on foot quite easily and they were never domesticated. Not sure just how many counterexamples one needs to note that is was lack of interest to domesticate that was the problem, not lack of available animals. Obviously though, in the first moments in history the tribal Americans spotted the horse, they jumped right on domestication. It's not that they weren't able to domesticate or didn't have the proper species available. It's that they lacked the interest, just as for the most part they lacked interest in literacy, mathematics, etc.

Finally I have to say I find it extremely unlikely the Hamster is the only creature to be domesticated in modern times. That sounds like a factoid invented by this theorist. What about skunks, ferrets, and sugar gliders? That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:03 am

Not sure how accurate this article is, but it somewhat matches what I have read and heard elsewhere.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6- ... erica.html

choff · Post by **choff** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:35 am

GIThruster wrote:Well that's an interesting theory. Guess I'll need to pick up the book.

Skippy, there were a very small number of diseases that killed native Americans from their contact with Europeans. The very worst of these was certainly smallpox which is only carried by humans, and during the Indian wars, it is true germ warfare was used to slaughter large numbers. There are the stories of blankets being deliberately infected with the virus, etc. We don't know much because no one kept accurate records of this, and all deaths do to infectious diseases are broadly estimated between 1 and 18 million. Your 90% figure is based on conjecture as no one really knows how many died or precisely from what. But even given the high side, 18 million, that is very low compared to something like the Black Death that killed more than 450 million.

I am not buying the animal domestication argument as I said: no one ever bothered to domesticate the peccaries otherwise known as Javelina native to North America and by virtue of their much smaller size than other species of pig, they would have been easier to domesticate. There are all the various sorts of wild goats and sheep that were never domesticated, and Native American domestication of the dog is pretty pathetic by the standards of Europe and Asia. In Africa they domesticate antelope and North America is full of them. Wild Turkeys can be chased down on foot quite easily and they were never domesticated. Not sure just how many counterexamples one needs to note that is was lack of interest to domesticate that was the problem, not lack of available animals. Obviously though, in the first moments in history the tribal Americans spotted the horse, they jumped right on domestication. It's not that they weren't able to domesticate or didn't have the proper species available. It's that they lacked the interest, just as for the most part they lacked interest in literacy, mathematics, etc.

Finally I have to say I find it extremely unlikely the Hamster is the only creature to be domesticated in modern times. That sounds like a factoid invented by this theorist. What about skunks, ferrets, and sugar gliders? That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.

If this is true, has anyone else tried to domesticate these wild North American animals since then, and with what results?

choff · Post by **choff** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:46 am

N. Europeans have only settled in large numbers outside of Europe in identical climatic zones. Falklands, Southern Austrailia, New Zealand, S. Africa and Northern North American. We don't trive in the Tropics, during WW2, the British Army in Burma suffered 99% casualties, 1% caused by the Japanese. Beri Beri, Malaria, Dengue Fever, Dysenteri got the rest.

choff · Post by **choff** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 3:56 am

Here`s the list.

Approximate dates and locations of original domestication

Main article: List of domesticated animals

Species

Date

Location

Dog (Canis lupus familiaris)

between 30000 BC and 7000 BC[19][20][21]

Europe, East Asia and Africa

Sheep (Ovis orientalis aries)

between 11000 BC and 9000 BC[22][23]

Southwest Asia

Pig (Sus scrofa domestica)

9000 BC[24][25]

Near East, China, Germany

Goat (Capra aegagrus hircus)

8000 BC[26]

Iran

Cow (Bos primigenius taurus)

8000 BC[27][28]

India, Middle East, and North Africa

Cat (Felis catus)

7500 BC[16][17][18][29]

Cyprus and Near East

Chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus)

6000 BC[30]

India and Southeast Asia

Guinea pig (Cavia porcellus)

5000 BC[31]

Peru

Donkey (Equus africanus asinus)

5000 BC[32][33]

Egypt

Domesticated duck (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus)

4000 BC

China

Water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis)

4000 BC

India, China

Horse (Equus ferus caballus)

4000 BC[34]

Eurasian Steppes

Dromedary (Camelus dromedarius)

4000 BC

Arabia

Llama (Lama glama)

3500 BC

Peru

Silkworm (Bombyx mori)

3000 BC

China

Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus)

3000 BC[35]

Russia

Rock pigeon (Columba livia)

3000 BC

Mediterranean Basin

Goose (Anser anser domesticus)

3000 BC[36]

Egypt

Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus)

2500 BC

Central Asia

Yak (Bos grunniens)

2500 BC

Tibet

Banteng (Bos javanicus)

Unknown

Southeast Asia, Java Island

Gayal (Bos gaurus frontalis)

Unknown

Southeast Asia

Alpaca (Vicugna pacos)

1500 BC

Peru

Ferret (Mustela putorius furo)

1500 BC-

Europe

Muscovy Duck (Cairina momelanotus)

Unknown

South America

Guineafowl

Unknown

Africa

Common carp (Cyprinus carpio)

Unknown

East Asia

Domesticated turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)

500 BC

Mexico

Goldfish (Carassius auratus auratus)

Unknown

China

European Rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus)

AD 600

Europe

Second circle

Species

Date

Location

Zebu (Bos primigenius indicus)

8000 BC

India

Honey bee

4000 BC

Multiple places

Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) (endangered)

2000 BC

Indus Valley civilization

Fallow Deer (Dama dama)

1000 BC

Mediterranean Basin

Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus)

500 BC

India

Barbary Dove (Streptopelia risoria)

500 BC

North Africa

Japanese Quail (Coturnix japonica)

1100–1900

Japan

Mandarin Duck (Aix galericulata)

Unknown

China

Mute Swan (Cygnus olor)

1000–1500

Europe

Canary (Serinus canaria domestica)

1600

Canary Islands, Europe

[edit] Modern instances

This section may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. (September 2007)

Species

Date

Location

Fancy rat (Rattus norvegicus)

1800s

UK

Fox (Vulpes vulpes)

1800s

Europe

European Mink (Mustela lutreola)

1800s

Europe

Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus)

1850s

Europe

Cockatiel (Nymphicus hollandicus)

1870s

Europe

Zebra Finch (Taeniopygia guttata)

1900s

Australia

Hamster (Mesocricetus auratus)

1930s

United States

Silver Fox

1950s

Soviet Union

Muskox (Ovibos moschatus)

1960s

United States

Corn Snake (Pantherophis guttatus guttatus)

1960s

United States

Ball python (Python regius)

1960s

Africa

Madagascar hissing cockroach (Gromphadorhina portentosa)

1960s

Madagascar

Red Deer (Cervus elaphus)

1970s

New Zealand

Hedgehog (Atelerix albiventris)

1980s

United States

Sugar Glider (Petaurus breviceps)

1980s

Australia

Skunk (Mephitis mephitis)

1980s

United States

GIThruster · Post by **GIThruster** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 4:27 am

choff wrote: If this is true, has anyone else tried to domesticate these wild North American animals since then, and with what results?

I'm not aware of any attempts. Lets face it, they'd be counterproductive. Pigs have been bread for many centuries to be bigger and fatter than anything the Javelina could possibly become without many more centuries of hard work. We already have domestic goats, so why domesticate Billygoats, Dalls sheep and Bighorn sheep? Americans didn't even domesticate Longhorn cattle and Buffalo, prefering instead the highly refined Hereford and Holstein cattle. I think deer are generally not domesticated because they are generally a handful. They're much more swift and at times dangerous, so not worth the effort if you have pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, etc. The Africans domestication of antelope, a very small, manageable deer; is an exception to the rule that deer don't get domesticated. They can after all be quite dangerous and often fight over their womenfolk to the death.

Skippy, Cracked can be funny, but it's not a place to look for serious scholarship and much of it is made up. In any event, estimates are that small pox killed at most 18 million Native Americans and we know it killed 300 million Europeans. Note that these simplistic analyses that attribute domination to disease all fail to look squarely at the fact that the actual Indian wars occurred hundreds of years later than the plagues and that was when there was this final confrontation that lasted just a few decades. the actual "Indian Wars" were almost exclusively 19th century, more than 400 years after the smallpox plague Cracked is writing about. Also note, Cracked didn't put in any dates. . .how convenient.

choff · Post by **choff** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 5:31 am

My point is that the indians did as much as was possible to advance themselves with the resources and time available. When they had a good domesticated horse they became expert cavalry, nobodies had any great luck riding zebras.

GIThruster · Post by **GIThruster** » Sat Jul 14, 2012 7:16 am

Point made but please note, Native Americans did not develop writing, not even pictographic writing as did the Central and South American tribes. Writing is one important hallmark of civilization--especially symbolic as opposed to pictographic writing. They didn't develop sewers, which is what is necessary to build cities. No cities, folks! This example of a large group of houses on the northern boarder of one of the Great Lakes is an example of failure, because they didn't build sewers to carry off human waste. The group of houses there were suddenly evacuated because putting so many people so close together without a way to carry off the waste is fatal. When we see this in 6,000 year old remains in the Middle East, we handily call it a failure.

No mathematics to speak of, at least none we know about. No significant buildings. No silos. No agriculture. No domestication of animals. No chemistry. No firearms. No steam power. None of the technological advances that made Europeans the dominant civilization of the time.

Just seems silly to me to object to calling them savages. They were technologically 6,000 years behind the people who displaced them.

End of story.

tomclarke · Post by **tomclarke** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 8:58 am

GIThruster wrote:Point made but please note, Native Americans did not develop writing, not even pictographic writing as did the Central and South American tribes. Writing is one important hallmark of civilization--especially symbolic as opposed to pictographic writing. They didn't develop sewers, which is what is necessary to build cities. No cities, folks! This example of a large group of houses on the northern boarder of one of the Great Lakes is an example of failure, because they didn't build sewers to carry off human waste. The group of houses there were suddenly evacuated because putting so many people so close together without a way to carry off the waste is fatal. When we see this in 6,000 year old remains in the Middle East, we handily call it a failure.

No mathematics to speak of, at least none we know about. No significant buildings. No silos. No agriculture. No domestication of animals. No chemistry. No firearms. No steam power. None of the technological advances that made Europeans the dominant civilization of the time.

Just seems silly to me to object to calling them savages. They were technologically 6,000 years behind the people who displaced them.

End of story.

Savage:
1. A person regarded as primitive or uncivilized.
2. A person regarded as brutal, fierce, or vicious.

Nothing here about technology.

3. civilisation - a society in an advanced state of social development (e.g., with complex legal and political and religious organizations)civilisation - a society in an advanced state of social development (e.g., with complex legal and political and religious organizations); "the people slowly progressed from barbarism to civilization"

Nothing here about technology.

jnaujok · Post by **jnaujok** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 3:52 pm

GIThruster wrote:
choff wrote: If this is true, has anyone else tried to domesticate these wild North American animals since then, and with what results?
I'm not aware of any attempts.

Actually there are several dozen wild game farms here in Colorado that raise the "wild game" for the various specialty restaurants in the Aspen, Vail, etc. regions.

Because of FDA regulations on actual wild game, it would be illegal to serve actual wild game at restaurants. All food must be farm raised. So we have elk farms, moose farms, antelope, mountain goat, wild boar, and even black bear farms here in the state. Not to mention the alligator farm to the south (based in a hot spring) although they only really sell the Tilapia raised there to local restaurants. Nothing like an African lake fish raised 10,000 miles from Africa.

GIThruster · Post by **GIThruster** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 6:48 pm

Are they "wild game ranches" or is the game domesticated? If what you're talking about is like a wild game preserve, where a large tract of land has a 12' high fence around it and the game is left to itself, it's hard to see how to call that domestication.

Tom, if you study cultural anthropology, you'll find that the hallmarks of civilization are all technological. Doing technology is essentially the development of tools that allow one to either do something they couldn't do without them, or to do something far better/faster/cheaper than they could without the tools. In measuring civilizations, anthropologists concede that the most important tools are things like the ability to write, the ability to build permanent structures, the ability to build cities, metallurgy, etc. In particular, groups that never learned to write or build permanent structures are called "uncivilized" and do not qualify as civilizations. The North American Indians certainly fit in this category as do many peoples in Africa, Australia, and various tropical isle locations.

Obviously, people must mean something, when they contrast the terms "civilized" with "uncivilized" and as you note, the term "savage" relates only to those considered uncivilized. That we further think in terms of incremental steps of technology by which to judge civilizations is easily seen with use of the terms "bronze age", "iron age", "agrarian age", "steam age", "industrial age", "space age", "information age", and even the fictional "nano-tech age", "quantum age", "PSI age", "temporal age" and "ascendant age".

GIThruster · Post by **GIThruster** » Sun Jul 15, 2012 9:13 pm

Here's a modern take on the distinctions between civilized and uncivilized. My classes in anthropology were 25-30 years ago and I don't recall this concept "Neolithic Revolution" bandied around but it is possible it goes back that far:

"The Neolithic Revolution or Neolithic Demographic Transition, sometimes called the Agricultural Revolution, was the world's first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture. It was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement which supported an increasingly large population.[1] Archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in six separate locations worldwide circa 10,000–7000 years BP (8,000–5,000 BC).

However, the Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns, which radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g., irrigation and food storage technologies) that allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for high population density settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing). The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities (ca. 3,500 BC), whose emergence also inaugurates the end of the prehistoric Neolithic period.

The relationship of the above-mentioned Neolithic characteristics to the onset of agriculture, their sequence of emergence, and empirical relation to each other at various Neolithic sites remains the subject of academic debate, and seems to vary from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution.[2][3]"

25 years ago, we were taught in anthropology that the key element between civilized and uncivilized was the ability to write. At that time, anthropologists were even saying that pictographic writing was not the hallmark, but rather only symbolic writing, as pictographic writing is incapable of carrying the detailed information necessary to real transformation of a society. That was heatedly contested because even though pictographic writing cant carry the same level of information as symbolic writing, if symbolic writing were the single characteristic of civilization, one would be forced to say the ancient Maya, Inca, Aztec and even Egyptian were not civilizations, which is seemingly absurd. In the far east you're forced into an intense debate as ancient Chinese characters were pictographs and evolved into symbolic writing.

Now you can see from this concept of Neolithic Revolution, the subject has been broadened greatly, but in any event still relates to agriculture, and a sedentary lifestyle over that of a nomadic existence, such as is found with native North Americans.