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- May 26, 2019
This is about as much of a response I feel like acknowledging this thread with:
Why didn't Africans ever establish any society on par with the ones in Eurasia?
- Thread starter KID NAMED SCHWARMAPUNK
- Start date
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- Jul 12, 2015
Look at your geography. The reason Grevy's Zebra is the one most likely to be domesticated is that it's the largest variety and common in the horn of Africa, somewhere where there's a lot of settlements of size up and down the coast, and lots of interaction with the Middle East - in between them and the plains zebra, Grevy's just is going to be more appealing due to the size. Hayes experience with breaking zebras needs to be thrown out the window as it isn't relevant to the greater question at hand.
- Zebra are aggressive and dangerous to handle, and are much more used to avoiding humans and the huge variety of predators after them.
- Ancient Eurasian Wild Horses were larger, had fewer natural predators, and hadn't evolved alongside humans. They weren't by pure instinct going to see them as a threat.
- Even then, Eurasian Wild Horses are still aggressive, but the level of aggression was almost certainly lower. Their level of wanting to simply run the fuck away was also lower
- The abandoned foal hypothesis for taming into a breeding population only works out when the adopted foal isn't risking getting killed by loads of predators, or by random wild males if it is a male, in a fight over territory/mates. Taming =/= domestication. And even with a tamed male, you need tamed females too, otherwise those might fuck him up.
- Zebras have been taken into captivity throughout history, by many different peoples. Despite this, none of them attempted domestication.
- Domesticating zebras was not going to offer as many rewards as domesticating the horse to the people around them. Zebras would have only been useful for their meat and hides, which you can get by hunting them anyway. It's safer to hunt them than to domesticate them. For horses and cattle, this was also true at the start to a degree, but they were decent pack animals without going too far into domestication. Zebras just aren't big enough for that to be a valid option, and milking them wouldn't be easy.
That's the thing though - zebras do fight lions. They're actually not ineffective at fighting lions. They're known to kill lions. They run first, then if something gets close, they fucking kick at it, much like other horse species. Lack of larger predators actually means you need to fight back less, and while aggression is still incentivized, it's more for show. For zebras it's the difference between survival and death. Zebras are so cranky and ornery because they're not one of the megafauna - they're the prey of lots of large predators and anything that could be a predator that approaches needs to be dealt with. Wild horses are not as aggressive, and never were as aggressive.
Alright, you want me to simplify things for you here? Alright then. Let's go through the list.
- Zebra are aggressive and dangerous to handle, and are much more used to avoiding humans and the huge variety of predators after them.
- Ancient Eurasian Wild Horses were larger, had fewer natural predators, and hadn't evolved alongside humans. They weren't by pure instinct going to see them as a threat.
- Even then, Eurasian Wild Horses are still aggressive, but the level of aggression was almost certainly lower. Their level of wanting to simply run the fuck away was also lower
- The abandoned foal hypothesis for taming into a breeding population only works out when the adopted foal isn't risking getting killed by loads of predators, or by random wild males if it is a male, in a fight over territory/mates. Taming =/= domestication. And even with a tamed male, you need tamed females too, otherwise those might fuck him up.
- Zebras have been taken into captivity throughout history, by many different peoples. Despite this, none of them attempted domestication.
- Domesticating zebras was not going to offer as many rewards as domesticating the horse to the people around them. Zebras would have only been useful for their meat and hides, which you can get by hunting them anyway. It's safer to hunt them than to domesticate them. For horses and cattle, this was also true at the start to a degree, but they were decent pack animals without going too far into domestication. Zebras just aren't big enough for that to be a valid option, and milking them wouldn't be easy.
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2020
I'll just point out that Europe was extremely lucky. Compared to rest of Eurasia, Europe is the north-western Middle of Nowhere for once. Europe barely dodged being razed to the ground by the Mongols, then barely survived the Black Death - and the social change spearheaded by lots of people dying was beneficial in the long run! Then Europe was lucky to discover the Americas before overpopulation became too much of a problem.
Europe's luck ran out with WW I, when a whole genetic stock of a generation was thrown into a meatgrinder, and they did it AGAIN during WW II. It strikes me that Europe's success was an abberation in the grand scale of history...
Europe's luck ran out with WW I, when a whole genetic stock of a generation was thrown into a meatgrinder, and they did it AGAIN during WW II. It strikes me that Europe's success was an abberation in the grand scale of history...
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2019
People often say this, but look at population graphs, even population graphs of young people only, and if you remove the years, it's impossible to detect WW II, so insignificant is the effect on population that the wars had.
Also, the important parts of europe were razed by mongols; the northwestern parts of europe weren't anything of note in that time.
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2020
A lot of human potential got lost in both wars; Tolkien survived - how many of his peers didn't?
So many young and bright people were ordered to die, it broke the demographics and effectively defanged the population.
Mongols razed Kievan Rus (which was a barbarian threat to Central Europe anyway) and parts of Poland and Hungary (and Hungarians were barely above steppe nomads who razed Germany but 200 year ago, and managed to actually repel Mongols for a while) before Ogedei croaked; they did not sack France or the Iberian Peninsula which would be a complete disaster.
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2019
It's thought that the domesticated dog did not come from the wolf, rather it is its own species from the canid family.
How was Kievan Rus a threat? The Eastern Slavs kept most of the turko-mongol hordes at bay. They were effectively a wall of flesh defending Central Europe. The only country they significantly fucked was Bulgaria.
How? Industrialization happened in England, because the country had few people and due to climatic events - the Mini Ice age. England had at that point had a developed statehood. Geography also plays a part - England can defend its island territories, due to the seas. This allowed for an uninhibited technological progression. The Indian states had barely ever defeated its invaders.
The Human species isn't even 300 000 years old by some estimates. What's this "millions of years" bullshit?
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- Jul 12, 2015
India was one of the primary sources globally for finished manufactured goods in the 17th century. And that was without large scale manufacturing techniques that would catapult the British and other European powers ahead in the 18th century. The absolute anarchy of India is the only thing that kept this from happening, helped along of course by various European powers fucking around in the subcontinent. India was as much of a thunderdome as Europe, something people like to forget about. The collapse of the Mughal empire happened at just the right time for industrialization to be strangled in the crib on the sub continent.
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- Mar 15, 2021
Not to forget they're responsible for the Appaloosa horse breed.
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2018
Can't help but feel like this ignores an external element: The Europeans themselves.
While Africa has some resources Europeans valued, and definitely lead to some colonies to try to exploit that, your average European didn't, and doesn't, want to live in Africa. It's ecologically unfriendly to your average European. About the only place that really attracted Europeans in any major number was down near the southern tip, where the ecosystem and climate got somewhat less awful.
North America, though? Hell no. Europe wanted North America. It was like an "empty" (as far as Europeans were concerned) version of Europe. Yeah, a little different, but close enough to home as to be desirable. Hence the flood of willing settlers from virtually all over Europe.
Without the massive depopulation from disease, taking North America would have been bloodier, but I think the end result would have probably been very similar.
Imadeanaccounttoseedoxes
kiwifarms.net
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- Jul 12, 2015
Try catching one without using a horse and get back to me. Domestication does not equal taming. You can tame just about anything.
Imadeanaccounttoseedoxes
kiwifarms.net
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- Jan 2, 2021
This is fucking retarded. This monumental leap for our people is right there if only we could catch it. LMAO. The horse was domesticated multiple times. Other races managed to catch different sub-species of horses and domesticate them repeatedly
You've not proved they can't be domesticated, only coped. Almost anything that can be domesticated, especially if they're easy to tame, which the Zebra is, see the Point of the Horse.
The Soviets domesticated foxes as late as the 1960's with no problem at all. If you can tame Zebras to the point where they allow themselves to be ridden fairly easily, then there is no reason to think you wouldn't be able to domesticate them
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2015
To achieve true domestication, you need a breeding population. Zebra are already hard to catch. European Wild Horses were easier to catch than Zebra, as I’ve established multiple times. To get a steady domestic breeding population, you need to do this a lot, and also defend the herd. As I’ve mentioned before, the zebra herds would have been a net detriment to any population that managed to even get started on domestication. Why? Because zebra herds attract predators. All the big nasty predators of Africa and oh boy oh boy there’s a fuckload of them. So not only have you taken a massive risk to capture these animals that offer only moderate benefits to your survival at this stage, you’re also taking another even larger risk - bringing predators in close to you. Lions are dangerous, so are leopards, and the main survival strategy of the zebra is numbers, because without large numbers they’re lunch. They can fight and kill predators but unlike the wild horse which can and do kill the fuck out of wolves and other smaller predators by virtue of sheer size and strength, zebra are not the ones with the advantage here.
So congratulations, your group of herding nomads has expended a great deal of effort in the early stages of domestication of an animal that is very ill tempered, hard to obtain more of to grow the herd, and attracts large predators to you. This is not a net benefit. On the Eurasian steppe, there weren’t large hyper predators to attract. There were wolves, sure, but those weren’t that difficult to deal with and they already had practice warding them away.
Horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe happened with peoples who had small domesticated animals already, which they’d picked up from settled peoples on the edges of the steppe. Capturing a horse was hard, and because of all the failed domestication attempts we see in the archeological record, not always a strategy that lended itself towards cultural survival and continuation of domestication. That so many of them tried and failed should stress to you how difficult and how lucky the domestication of the horse actually was. Of the many groups that tried, the vast majority failed. And that was with an animal easier to catch and tame than the zebra. Remember too that domestication takes millennia of successes, especially in large animal with long gestation periods - like horses and zebras.
“Zebra are easy to tame” is misleading as they really aren’t. Domestic horses aren’t easy to tame either. Zebras are easy to tame for people who are used to dealing with horses because of a culture that has had the horse for millennia and spent absurd amounts of time learning to do this. Try taming a zebra without this knowledge and you start to see why so many groups that tried to domesticate the horse failed at it. Taming an animal that can easily kill you with a kick isn’t easy or fun. “But they still did it!” Yes, that is true but look at all the failures, in an environment almost completely optimized for domesticating the horse.
Zebra have spent 2 million years as the preferred prey of lions. They don’t want to be the preferred prey of lions so they’ve evolved behaviors to make them super skittish and aggressive as hell when captured. Wild horses haven’t spent the last 2 million years as the preferred prey of several large apex predators that could hunt them down on their own. While behaviorally and physically they’re similar, adaptations of the zebra to avoid being lion food makes it hard for them to be domesticated.
Sprucefrost
kiwifarms.net
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- Apr 12, 2021
Europeans are Gods chosen people, thats why. You can point to some genetic mutations that made whites more intelligent but very little research has been conducted on it. Also fuck that jew jared diamond and his dumb book