Guns, Germs & Steel

The answer to that question is unequivocal: No! The interpretation is refuted by five types of evidence: rapid acceptance of Eurasian domesticates by non-Eurasian peoples, the universal human penchant for keeping pets, the rapid domestication of the Ancient Fourteen, the repeated independent domestications of some of them, and the limited successes of modern efforts at further domestications.
First, when Eurasia's Major Five domestic mammals reached sub-saharan Africa, they were adopted by the most diverse African peoples wherever conditions permitted. Those African herders thereby achieved a 'ge advantage over African hunter-gatherers and quickly displaced them. particular, Bantu farmers who acquired cows and sheep spread out of their homeland in West Africa and within a short time overran the former hunter-gatherers in most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Even without

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acquiring crops, Khoisan peoples who acquired cows and sheep around 2,000 years ago displaced Khoisan hunter-gatherers over much of southern Africa. The arrival of the domestic horse in West Africa transformed warfare there and turned the area into a set of kingdoms dependent on cavalry. The only factor that prevented horses from spreading beyond West Africa was trypanosome diseases borne by tsetse flies.
The same pattern repeated itself elsewhere in the world, whenever peoples lacking native wild mammal species suitable for domestication finally had the opportunity to acquire Eurasian domestic animals. European! horses were eagerly adopted by Native Americans in both North and South America, within a generation of the escape of horses from European settlements. For example, by the 19th century North America's Great Plains Indians were famous as expert horse-mounted warriors and bison hunters, but they did not even obtain horses until the late 17th century. Sheep acquired from Spaniards similarly transformed Navajo Indian society and led to, among other things, the weaving of the beautiful woolen blankets for which the Navajo have become renowned. Within a decade of Tasmania's settlement by Europeans with dogs, Aboriginal Tasmanians who had never before seen dogs, began to breed them in large numbers for use in hunting. Thus, among the thousands of culturally diverse native peoples of Australia, the Americas, and Africa, no universal cultural tat stood in the way of animal domestication.
Surely, if some local wild mammal species of those continents had domesticable, some Australian, American, and African peoples won have domesticated them and gained great advantage from them, just they benefited from the Eurasian domestic animals that they immediatel; adopted when those became available. For instance, consider all the pies of sub-Saharan Africa living within the range of wild zebras and 1 falo. Why wasn't there at least one African hunter-gatherer tribe domesticated those zebras and buffalo and that thereby gained sway other Africans, without having to await the arrival of Eurasian horses cattle? All these facts indicate that the explanation for the lack of nath mammal domestication outside Eurasia lay with the locally available mammals themselves, not with the local peoples.
A second type of evidence for the same interpretation comes pets. Keeping wild animals as pets, and taming them, constitute an initiq

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in domestication. But pets have been reported from virtually all 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 tame 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 chance of being domesticated, that note 8 few … were domesticated long ago, but that the large remainder, who failed sometimes in only one small particular, are destined to perpetual wildness.'
Datesof domestication provide a third line of evidence confirming galton's view that early herding peoples quickly domesticated all big mammal species suitable for being domesticated. All species for whose dates of domestication we have archaeological evidence were domesticated between about 8000 and 2500 b.c.—that is, within the first few thousand years of the sedentary farming-herding societies that arose after the end

I 6 6 •GUNS,GERMS, AND STEEL
of the last Ice Age. As summarized in Table 9.3, the era of big mammal domestication began with the sheep, goat, and pig and ended with camels. Since 2500 b.c. there have been no significant additions.
It's true, of course, that some small mammals were first domesticated long after 2500 b.c. For example, rabbits were not domesticated for food until the Middle Ages, mice and rats for laboratory research not until the 20th century, and hamsters for pets not until the 1930s. The continuing development of domesticated small mammals isn't surprising, because there are literally thousands of wild species as candidates, and because they were of too little value to traditional societies to warrant the effort of raising them. But big mammal domestication virtually ended 4,500 years ago. By then, all of the world's 148 candidate big species must have been tested innumerable times, with the result that only a few passed the test and no other suitable ones remained.
Still a fourth line of evidence that some mammal species are much-more suitable than others is provided by the repeated independent domestications of the same species. Genetic evidence based on the portions of our genetic material known as mitochondrial DNA recently confirmed, as had long been suspected, that humped cattle of India and humpless European cattle were derived from two separate populations of wild ancestral;! cattle that had diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago. That is, Indian peoples domesticated the local Indian subspecies of wild aurochs, Southwest Asians independently domesticated their own Southwest Asiaiy subspecies of aurochs, and North Africans may have independently domesticated the North African aurochs.
Similarly, wolves were independently domesticated to become dogs ii the Americas and probably in several different parts of Eurasia, includii China and Southwest Asia. Modern pigs are derived from independent! sequences of domestication in China, western Eurasia, and possibly other| areas as well. These examples reemphasize that the same few suitable wild ] species attracted the attention of many different human societies.
ihefailures of modern efforts provide a final type of evidence 1 past failures to domesticate the large residue of wild candidate s[ arose from shortcomings of those species, rather than from shortcot