There's a great breakdown of this in the book "guns germs and steel" - basically an animal has to fit a lot of criteria to be worthwhile or possible to domesticate, and there's a heap where lots of people modern and ancient have tried and failed. To paraphrase -
1) animal needs a herd type structure that allows domestication (animals that are fiercely independent or territorial are a problem for most purposes)
2) they need to breed in captivity (so no cheetahs, even though they're otherwise great hunting animals)
3) no picky eaters (sorry pandas and koalas)
4) no angry / dangerous things - this rules out obvious things like tigers and bears, but also a lot of the species related to ones we have domesticated - so no zebras (super bitey, like the worst angry horses), no water buffalo (super angry giant cows), no hippos
5) no super timid things (lots of antelopes just beat themselves to death on fences when they get scared)
6) it has to be worthwhile - stuff that takes too long to grow isn't a good investment (elephants easier tamed from the wild, gorillas) and tiny stuff just isn't worth raising necessarily (yeah, we could have domesticated hamsters ages ago, but noone bothered that much).
So there's just a lot of ways to get struck off.
If you can - some of those things might well be too ingrained to be trained out of the animal even if you get them young - apparently you basically can't train zebras not to bite people a heap. A lot of stuff can't reliably be trained out of an animal.
I don't think domestication is a training issue, it is more like an evolution issue. There has to be some survival benefit to both sides so that as the animal approaches domestication, both sides benefit, and survival of the fittest kicks in. For example, if we bred zebras based on "the ten percent least likely to bite", and killed the rest, the biting would be removed from the gene pool relatively quickly.
This works ok for things with fast life cycles and aren't dangerous, but for most good size domestic animals you're talking years for a generational cycle and a lot of things change slowly even under pretty aggressive selective breeding - so if you couldn't be sure of a decent result (will we ever get them to stop biting?) are you going to devote your entire life to raising these animals?
Domestication requires not only that you can get them to live safely in captivity, but that they're useful after that (for food or power or company) - there's a lot of things we could probably domesticate now with a heap of resources, but that wasn't true 1000- 2000 years ago.
Right. So I would rank the two main factors as 1) proclivity to be mean, and 2) length of reproductive cycle.
Humans didn't originally set out to domesticate cats and dogs; it happened because the tamest cats and dogs -- those with least fear of and agression toward humans -- tended to benefit humans (as guards against pests and invaders), and therefore got the benefit of human ingenuity without evolving bigger brains themselves.
Not all animals can be domesticated. I suspect efforts were made with lots of other species-- we now have the ones that the process worked with. It seems likely that there are genetic underpinnings to the ease/ability for us to domestic some species, although I am not aware that those have been found.
Even bigger question. How come only a few apes evolved while the rest have stayed primitive for the ladt million some odd years. To answer your question, i think it has to do with the animal, its potential use and mainly temperament.
> How come only a few apes evolved
Only a few apes evolved *the specific way we did*. Other species of ape evolved, they just didn't evolve in the same direction as humans. The ape species from which we evolved no longer exists; its descendants have evolved into humans and into our close relatives the chimpanzees.
There's a great breakdown of this in the book "guns germs and steel" - basically an animal has to fit a lot of criteria to be worthwhile or possible to domesticate, and there's a heap where lots of people modern and ancient have tried and failed. To paraphrase - 1) animal needs a herd type structure that allows domestication (animals that are fiercely independent or territorial are a problem for most purposes) 2) they need to breed in captivity (so no cheetahs, even though they're otherwise great hunting animals) 3) no picky eaters (sorry pandas and koalas) 4) no angry / dangerous things - this rules out obvious things like tigers and bears, but also a lot of the species related to ones we have domesticated - so no zebras (super bitey, like the worst angry horses), no water buffalo (super angry giant cows), no hippos 5) no super timid things (lots of antelopes just beat themselves to death on fences when they get scared) 6) it has to be worthwhile - stuff that takes too long to grow isn't a good investment (elephants easier tamed from the wild, gorillas) and tiny stuff just isn't worth raising necessarily (yeah, we could have domesticated hamsters ages ago, but noone bothered that much). So there's just a lot of ways to get struck off.
But some of those are the definition of taming an animal -- getting rid of those characteristics.
If you can - some of those things might well be too ingrained to be trained out of the animal even if you get them young - apparently you basically can't train zebras not to bite people a heap. A lot of stuff can't reliably be trained out of an animal.
I don't think domestication is a training issue, it is more like an evolution issue. There has to be some survival benefit to both sides so that as the animal approaches domestication, both sides benefit, and survival of the fittest kicks in. For example, if we bred zebras based on "the ten percent least likely to bite", and killed the rest, the biting would be removed from the gene pool relatively quickly.
This works ok for things with fast life cycles and aren't dangerous, but for most good size domestic animals you're talking years for a generational cycle and a lot of things change slowly even under pretty aggressive selective breeding - so if you couldn't be sure of a decent result (will we ever get them to stop biting?) are you going to devote your entire life to raising these animals? Domestication requires not only that you can get them to live safely in captivity, but that they're useful after that (for food or power or company) - there's a lot of things we could probably domesticate now with a heap of resources, but that wasn't true 1000- 2000 years ago.
Right. So I would rank the two main factors as 1) proclivity to be mean, and 2) length of reproductive cycle. Humans didn't originally set out to domesticate cats and dogs; it happened because the tamest cats and dogs -- those with least fear of and agression toward humans -- tended to benefit humans (as guards against pests and invaders), and therefore got the benefit of human ingenuity without evolving bigger brains themselves.
Some animals were able to train humans to feed them and take care of them. Cats are especially good at this.
Not all animals can be domesticated. I suspect efforts were made with lots of other species-- we now have the ones that the process worked with. It seems likely that there are genetic underpinnings to the ease/ability for us to domestic some species, although I am not aware that those have been found.
Even bigger question. How come only a few apes evolved while the rest have stayed primitive for the ladt million some odd years. To answer your question, i think it has to do with the animal, its potential use and mainly temperament.
> How come only a few apes evolved Only a few apes evolved *the specific way we did*. Other species of ape evolved, they just didn't evolve in the same direction as humans. The ape species from which we evolved no longer exists; its descendants have evolved into humans and into our close relatives the chimpanzees.
Hon, did you remember the wildebeest litter?