I've never heard a convincing answer as to why North American natives never domesticated Bison. Their range spans areas where there was settled agrarian civilization, such as Cahokia, so why didn't the natives there bother domesticating them? The only reason I've heard is that they're too big and aggressive, but the exact same could be said about cattle's wild ancestor, yet people in Eurasia were still able to domesticate them.
>cattle's wild ancestor
Image being the white guy who looked at this thing and thought, "yeah I am going to make that plow my fields and then eat it and drink its milk"
mad lads and the true master race.
>Image being the white guy
White people didn't domesticate the auroch, not even their own distinct subspecies. Can't believe no one checked you for this, aurochs were domesticated in the Middle East and India.
possibly NE Africa too.
Really? Any sources on that, because that sounds really interesting. I know that camels *might* have been domesticated in Somalia and/or Southern Arabia around 5,000 years ago, but the North African auroch would also be cool.
They werent domesticated in the middle east, the strain of Auroch domesticated became common in West Asia, but this was prior to the expansion of Basal Eurasians (what non-European West Eurasians are).
They were domesticated somewhere in the Black Sea Basin which was previously a lot of open plains and forested hills where Auroch made their homes.
Its weird to me that 84 IQ arabs who never left the middle ages and worship a trading post religion think they domesticated anything lol.
how about you get your IQ above that of a Finnish 15 year old then you spin your fairytales about being advanced for stacking rocks with mass slave labor.
>we wuz cattle herderz n shit
Hey dumbass, those farmers from the Middle East (Anatolia, Iran, the Levant, all three of which held the earliest cattle) contributed DNA to modern Middle Eastern and North African people, and I'd hardly call those early people white. Light skinned sure, but not white (European). I personally have no skin in the game regardless as I'm neither European nor Middle Eastern, it's just a fact that cattle were domesticated in what we now call the Middle East, which isn't just Saudi Arabia or Yemen like you think it is.
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/29/9/2101/1077727
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3625352/
And even then, cattle were domesticated again within the Indian subcontinent, specifically the Neolitic archaeological site called Mehrgarh in Pakistan, possibly by people from Mesopotamia that migrated east, likely proto-Iranian farmers that predate Indo-Europeans. The native subspecies of auroch from the Indian subcontinent went extinct thousands of years after the modern zebu began to exist.
Two words
Lactose tolerance
Hey moron. Their “contribution” peaks at 34% in Lebanese and then drops off to a peak at 22% on Druze Monkeys.
Arabs are literally subhuman basal Eurasians who never accomplished anything but establishing a religion around desert trading posts.
No brown friend, your kind did not domesticated cows. White native lands include the fertile crescent where cows got domesticated by us, white men.
>white guy
have a nice day amerimutt
I’m hardly an expert, but I believe the socioeconomic didn’t work out. Pre-European contact, bison hunting was necessarily done on foot and with bows firing flint arrows. It’s not a particularly efficient subsistence strategy, often needed supplementing with other hunting/gathering/horticulture.
As such, the bison hunting groups were ones that were smaller, weaker, and got pushed out of the good farmland that the actual agriculturalists were cultivating. And those groups tended to spend their efforts at trying to expand into farmland somewhere and take up agriculture, not domesticating the bison to make their low status, sucky sort of lifestyle a bit better.
Then the Europeans came. Horses and guns make bison hunting way easier, and plagues hit the more densely populated agricultural areas harder. The notion of plains Indians living primarily off of bison herds is what is in pop understanding because it’s better documented, but it was actually a pretty small snapshot of life of native Americans, and didn’t last long enough to domesticate an ungulate.
I understand why the less agrarian and more nomadic natives didn't domesticate them, but why didn't the settled agrarians ones do it? Just saying that they didn't want to make efforts to do it doesn't make any sense, or at least the reasons you gave don't.
Animals that are useful are domesticated. Having a cattle type of species would be very beneficial to native Americans.
>but why didn't the settled agrarians ones do it?
At a guess, and I want to emphasize this is a guess because my understanding of precolumbian agriculture is very weak, but it probably wasn’t short-term beneficial. Keeping bison around means dedicating a lot of land as pasture for them, land which otherwise could be used to grow crops. I’m guessing that the advantage of domesticated bison wasn’t viewed as worth setting aside the farmland, especially in the earlier phases of the project when they’re still wild and haven’t been selected for meat and milk yields.
>them, land which otherwise could be used to grow crops
All crops originally fed animals
>keto cultist posting spergout incoming
Lets hear it anon, how does eating grains turn you gay?
I don't think this explanation makes sense because every society that has practiced animal husbandry has found it beneficial to set aside some land for pastures. Also keep in mind that farmland wasn't in short supply. And besides, why didn't this same line of reasoning apply to the people in Asia who domesticated the auroch?
Why didn't the people who domesticated aurochs also think like this? Also the "walking around in huge numbers everywhere" doesn't really apply because we're discussing settled civilizations, not hunter-gatherers who follow game around.
All animals have evolved around predators, this isn't unique to bison. Also this is from the wiki,
>American bison are more easily tamed than the European and breed more readily with domestic cattle
>Why didn't the people who domesticated aurochs also think like this? Also the "walking around in huge numbers everywhere" doesn't really apply because we're discussing settled civilizations, not hunter-gatherers who follow game around.
Because, Pirahã do not make canoes.
>I don't think this explanation makes sense because every society that has practiced animal husbandry has found it beneficial to set aside some land for pastures.
But they don’t, as a rule, domesticate those animals. They get them, fully domesticated, from more pastoral societies and don’t face the choice of keeping around marginally productive animals for god knows how long hoping they might pay off later. Sheep, goat, and cattle domestication all occurred in parts of the world that did not as of yet have agriculture there and then spread outwards.
>And besides, why didn't this same line of reasoning apply to the people in Asia who domesticated the auroch?
Auroch domestication happened in one particular part of Central Turkey, about 1,000 years before you have archaeological evidence of cultivated cereals there, and then spread all throughout Eurasia and Africa.
>But they don’t, as a rule, domesticate those animals. They get them, fully domesticated, from more pastoral societies
How is that relevant to your reasoning? Whether they domesticate them themselves or get the domesticated from someone else, they still have to set aside farmland for pastures.
>and don’t face the choice of keeping around marginally productive animals for god knows how long hoping they might pay off later
You say that as if pastoralists don't also have to deal with that. Both pastoralists and agriculturalists share in the challenges of domestication.
>Auroch domestication happened in one particular part of Central Turkey, about 1,000 years before you have archaeological evidence of cultivated cereals there, and then spread all throughout Eurasia and Africa.
The wiki says they were domesticated at the start of the neolithic revolution by farmers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs#Domestication
>How is that relevant to your reasoning?
Because the importers are setting aside farmland to pasture fully domesticated animals ready to provide the resources they were domesticated for. The agricultural society doing domestication has to incur the same costs for half-wild animals that are not nearly as productive. With a much smaller immediate upside, they don’t bother.
>You say that as if pastoralists don't also have to deal with that. Both pastoralists and agriculturalists share in the challenges of domestication.
Sure, but if you don’t have agriculture as a competing demand for your land, you have much less upside for the alternatives, since you don’t really have any. You’re not trying to pit barely domesticated animals against fully domesticated cereals in what that land can yield for you.
>The wiki says they were domesticated at the start of the neolithic revolution by farmers
From that article:
>The earliest known domestication of the aurochs dates to the Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent, where cattle hunted and kept by Neolithic farmers gradually decreased in size between 9800 and 7500 BC
To link a different one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_Crescent
>Cereals were already grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago.[17]
You’re seeing this process before the start of domesticated cereal production, I.e. agriculture.
>The agricultural society doing domestication has to incur the same costs for half-wild animals that are not nearly as productive.
I think you're underestimating the benefit even semi-domesticated bison would give. They would still give almost all the same benefits a fully domesticated bison would, they would just be more unruly and hard to deal with.
>but if you don’t have agriculture as a competing demand for your land, you have much less upside for the alternatives, since you don’t really have any
Like I said, you have to also keep in mind that land was not in short supply. There were vast swaths of high quality unused land that could either be used for farming or pastures, so there wasn't much of a sacrifice to use some of it for pastures.
>You’re not trying to pit barely domesticated animals against fully domesticated cereals in what that land can yield for you.
What animals can yield for you and what plants can are entirely different, but necessary things (such as meat, milk, and hides). Animals can also boost the agricultural output with their dung as fertilizer and as draft animals.
>Bison can be incredibly temperamental and are incredibly strong, YES EVEN COMPARED TO AUROCHS
They're pretty much the same size and weight as aurochs, but in terms of temperament, you can look up plenty of videos on youtube where people are getting close to, feeding, and even petting tamed bison. They're not so temperamental that they'll just gore you even if you've raised one in captivity, any more so than an auroch would.
>you can look up plenty of videos on youtube where people are getting close to, feeding, and even petting tamed bison. You know there are plenty of videos of people doing the same thing with lions, tigers, bears, rattlesnakes and alligators right? Those animals still aren't properly domesticated the same way cows, horses, dogs and cats are.
>rattlesnakes
not mammals
>alligators
same
>lions
not bovines
Why don't you talk about wolves senpai? Humans managed to domesticate those at least.
>Wolves
Try domesticating another canine. The African wild dog. Also by your logic lions are felines just like the housecat and can be domesticated the same way.
>try domesticating African dogs
My ancestors were not African, and left me enough livestock so I don't need to alter the ecosystem further for my needs. They tried and succeeded in domestication. You keep moving the goalposts because your "wild zebra" argument falls flat on its face when we have ample evidence of several other equines being fully domesticated.
>Those animals still aren't properly domesticated the same way cows, horses, dogs and cats are.
Obviously, the point is to show that they can be tamed, which is the first step in domestication.
>I think you're underestimating the benefit even semi-domesticated bison would give. They would still give almost all the same benefits a fully domesticated bison would, they would just be more unruly and hard to deal with.
Unlikely, especially in regards to dairy production which is the biggest use of domestic ungulates.
>Like I said, you have to also keep in mind that land was not in short supply
That is simply not true. The entire pattern of groups on the losing end of wars being driven out to the non-agricultural marginal land to hunt bison in the first place indicates that there wasn't enough to go around for the sort of agriculture they were practicing.
>What animals can yield for you and what plants can are entirely different, but necessary things (such as meat, milk, and hides)
They are broadly substituteable goods. PLaces like southern China which had very little land turned over to pasturage managed to get by just fine on nuts, rice, berries, and linen for clothing, and almost no consumption of milk, meat, and hides.
>Animals can also boost the agricultural output with their dung as fertilizer and as draft animals.
Those are some of those things that you really do need fully domesticated animals for. You really think a half-wild animal is going to plow in a straight line after you tie something to its back? Or that a society with no tradition of animal husbandry in a large sense is going to draw the connection between dung fertilizer and increased crop yields? Again, this sort of process works a lot better if you have the domesticated ungulates first, and then start farming; but the Native Americans have it the other way around.
Even if your idea that agrarian societies don't domesticate animals is correct, it still raises the question as to why the more nomadic native Americans didn't domesticate them.
>it still raises the question as to why the more nomadic native Americans didn't domesticate them.
Didn't have horses or herding dogs and the Great Plains lacked a decent supply of wood to build fences or pens to house livestock in. Bison will also try to break a fence down and no wooden fence is going to hold them for very long. It took 20th century technology to build fencing able to contain them.
>Didn't have horses
The people who domesticated aurochs didn't have horses either
>or herding dogs
They had dogs which could be taught and breed to be herding dogs
>and the Great Plains lacked a decent supply of wood to build fences or pens to house livestock in
The historic range of bison extended far beyond the great plains. There was enough wood.
>Didn't have horses
Anon horses originated in the Americas
You already admitted that the reasons they didn't made sense up here.
. At this point, it's pretty clear you're not openly inquiring, you have some theory or notion you want to push and will reject anything that doesn't conform to it. What's your angle, OP?
>You already admitted that the reasons they didn't made sense up here
I said that because I thought aurochs were domesticated by settled farmers, but now I've learned they weren't.
Native Americans never got into nomadism and pastorialism. It seems that was probably the driving force in Eurasian innovation. If only for the role it played between East-West and West-East transmission of techniques and beliefs.
Domestications are fairly rare. Of all the millions of species that have had sustained contact with man, only a handful were domesticated.
there's some cope in this thread but I think the answer is "they weren't smart enough"
It's not just intelligence, but perseverance too. They didn't try hard or long enough (if at all), same with sub-Saharans.
You're acting like domestication was some common thing.
Random steppegays domesticated the horse and then took over the entire world in like 500 years.
>You're acting like domestication was some common thing
It is though. Native Americans domesticated other species, so why not the Bison as well?
>Bro just spend hours a day of your busy day and half of your crops feeding and raising some shit that's literally walking around in huge numbers everywhere and fattening itself up for free!
/thread
So, your argument is that amerindians were just plain lazy? Did I get that right?
Once again,
Pirahã do not make canoes.
When you understand the significance of this statement, you will have the answer to your question.
Bison were too aggressive and un-tameable because they evolved around now-extinct Pleistocene predators.
>I've never heard a convincing answer as to why North American natives never domesticated Bison.
That's surprising. Have you studied them at all? They moved all the time. When the hunted populations leveled down, they would let it flourish again by leaving the area alone. This meant they moved to a completely different area. There was no need to do anything differently because they had more than they could ask for. This is one of the reasons they were disgusted when it came to Europeans, who acted like israelites and just destroyed everything without any sense of conservation. All so British hens back in overseas could have furs, and they could get sheckles.
Same reason why zebras can't be domesticated. If you've ever been around a bison you'd know they can be very temperamental and will charge at just about anything. They aren't buttholes because of their environment either because it's entirely genetic due in part to an elevated amount of cortisol production. In other words unlike horses or canines, bison and zebra will be dicks no matter how you try to raise them or how much you attempt to train them.
>If you've ever been around a bison you'd know they can be very temperamental and will charge at just about anything
That's because they're wild animals. The point of domestication is to breed this out of them. Do you think pic rel in
wasn't also temperamental?
>That's because they're wild animals.
You can still tame and ride a wild horse with enough effort and training. Have you ever heard of anybody taming and riding a zebra? No because they literally refuse to be domesticated. Temperament is very much related to genetics. The ancestors of cows just weren't as obstinate as bison.
>Have you ever heard of anybody taming and riding a zebra?
Congrats. Try riding one for more than an hour.
https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/zoology/item/can-zebras-be-domesticated/#:~:text=Answer,No%2C%20zebras%20cannot%20be%20domesticated.
>Try riding one for more than an hour
You're an idiot anon. Keep it up though.
He posted proof though. You're just choosing not to accept it.
It's called "cherry picking"
You don't know much about animal husbandry apparently. Taming takes considerably less time than full domestication, and that goes for all species. Go talk to any traditional breeder and they will tell you the same thing.
Animal husbandry can only develop in strictly patriarchal societies that pass it from father to son. What you wrote about zebras is bs, wild donkeys and horses were just as spirited and temperamental, if not more. Desert semites even domesticated the mighty camel the same way, although it happened after the first two.
Then why does everyone, and I do mean literally everyone, agree that zebras can't be domesticated like horses? Please provide proof they can be or explain how some random shitposter on IQfy has gained such esoteric knowledge.
>everyone
Everyone who argues this moronic point has either zero experience with or knowledge of traditional animal husbandry or is just trying to make non-whites feel better about and cope with their ancestral shortcomings. Political correctness has run amok in history and anthropology since the '60s.
Use your brain, don't let Jared Diamond do the thinking for you.
Still waiting for proof you can domesticate zebras like horses. Like any source whatsoever would be nice. No offence but I'm not gonna take your word for it.
>proof
>source
sure thing my Semitic friend. Please check this academic link. It proves with evidence that a wild carnivore can be domesticated. Zebras are herbivore so it shouldn't be that much harder for the superior wakandan kang.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_dog
>provides evidence a dog can be domesticated not a zebra
I asked for evidence that zebras can be specifically. If all you have are a couple of pictures and "yeah well dogs can be so why not zebras" I'm wasting my time. Bye shithead.
>shithead
why so hostile friend? I posted proof and sources that a wild predator can be fully domesticated. The proof you require needs a time machine and 100000 Botai horizon Aryans teleported to the savanna. Do you understand now or do I need to expand further?
Zebras lack a herd structure or hierarchy so they don't recognize a leader. It may be not coincidence that the only deer which have been domesticated are reindeer as they're a herd animal with a clear hierarchy.
Plains (by far the most populous species) and mountain zebra do have a hierarchical social structure and it is the same structure observed in both przewalski's horse (the only extant wild horse species) as well as groups of feral horses.
Only the Grevy's species of zebra is an outlier in this regard.
Horses weren’t domesticated. They are the product of domestication. The ancestor of Horses, which was similar to zebra in behavior, was domesticated. It stands to reason zebra can be domesticated.
If it can be selectively bred, it can be domesticated.
Can zebra not be selectively bred? Could not use mere brute force and just kill the more aggressive zebra in every generation while ensuring friendlier zebra reproduce more often?
Oh, yeah, those 2 pics again.
Tell me, if it was so doable, why did it remain a gimmick, that you have to rely on that century+ old example when bringing up zebra.
Heck, if it was intelligence, the euros were colonizing the frick out of Africa during the later half of the past millenium.
Surely, some colonial overlord, with his great aryan intelligence, could have been "hey, you know what would have been useful in tropical Africa?
An equine that's already adapted to this place, and doesn't get sick from random bullshit.
Let's make domestic zebras, so i can make my colonial life easier"
>the latter part of the last millennium.
historylet take, and you're coping way too hard. I presented my argument clearly, the lack of comprehension is a you problem.
Mustangs are ferrel DOMESTICATED horses, not wild animals. Thir gentics did not change compleatly from living a few hundert years kn the wild
This argument does not work, since the extinct wikd cow, the auerox was well known for uts high biolence and agrassion. And unlike the american biskon which lost most of its predtors in the end of the ice age, the auerox had to deal with lions, tigers, leopards, wolfs, bears and humans. And there is actual bision rangeing right now.
First of all, as everyone else said, Bison can be incredibly temperamental and are incredibly strong, YES EVEN COMPARED TO AUROCHS. I'm a big ass guy, I've handled Bison and they're fricking ridiculous, words cannot describe it, its like a robot wearing the skin of an animal. If you feel their actual muscle its like they have solid steel under their skin. On top of this ridiculous strength they can jump 6 feet vertically, so any pen good enough to enclose them would have to basically be a fortress, and if they escaped it'd be a slaughter, they'd tear entire homes apart.
They were also ridiculously numerous in a way modern people can't really comprehend, so when it comes to meat, it very reasonable didnt seem like it was worth the effort to pen them up instead of just hunting them like they always did. As for milk, their protective instincts go crazy when pregnant or around kids in a way thats well beyond cows or their ancestors, and they have very small udders so milking them really isn't practical.
I think eventually they would have been domesticated in some shape or form, but its not remotely comparable to the ancestors of cows. The domestication of aurochs was quite an achievement don't get me wrong, but bison are just way meaner and provide less immediate benefits compared to the aurochs.
>Bison can be incredibly temperamental and are incredibly strong, YES EVEN COMPARED TO AUROCHS
I'm sure you have interacted with plenty of aurochs to make that claim.
It can be inferred from the fact that they were domesticated
no it cant, how do you know the Auroch werent MORE temperamental than Bison?
>Auroch were domesticated and Bison werent
name the exact number of attempts made to domesticate Bison vs Auroch.
>how do you know the Auroch werent MORE temperamental than Bison?
If bison were less temperamental they would've been domesticated
>name the exact number of attempts made to domesticate Bison vs Auroch.
I don't know, they didn't have recorded history, nor would they keep records on that even if they did.
>If bison were less temperamental they would've been domesticated
That's circular reasoning at its finest, ignoring that American bison are currently in practice semi-domesticated and the existence of temperamental as frick relatives of other livestock such as wild boars. Or hell, even the fact that the training of fighting bulls in Spain consists of simply letting them live in a wild state before taking them to the bullring, that wouldn't work if they weren't originally vicious animals to begin with.
>If bison were less temperamental they would've been domesticated
can you prove this?
Where's the cutoff? What if Bison are domesticated 100 years from now?
>Bison werent
unironically was a skill issue
There were millions of zillions of roaming buffalo, no need for domesticaton at all If you don't have industry
It’s immoral.
Natives were moral.
Natives never domesticated the bison.
QED
>slaughtering buffaloes is moral
>domesticating cows is immoral
cope
>domesticating cows is immoral
No, but domesticating bison is.
Bison are too aggressive compared with cows and horses and although selective breeding might remove that tendency, it's easier to just start with an animal that was more docile to begin with.
Cows and horses weren’t domesticated, they are the products of domestication.
Why didn't Europeans?
Europeans had already domesticated several other large mammals by 1492 AD. They didn't really need to add the bison to the roster.
There's an animal called European bison. Europeans never domesticated it.
There was no need. They had something similar.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_buffalo
Domestic water buffalo are from tropical Asia, as well as most other domesticated bovid species. Why didn't Europeans bother domestication their own native aurochs and bison? Africans had the horse introduced to them and they still domesticated the donkey, so why didn't Europeans? I'll answer it for you: They didn't because they didn't. It's not a bad thing to not domesticate certain animals, not even in the slightest.
You're arguing with yourself champ. I never said Europeans domesticated the water buffalo. I said they had them.
>Europeans had already domesticated several other large mammals by 1492 AD
Europeans had acquired several other domesticated animals, but they only domesticated two large ones themselves: Reindeer and horses. Everything else came from the Middle East.
White people domesticated every domestic animal and were the first to domesticate any animal starting WHGs and dogs.
Bison live in gigantic herds of hundreds of animals that are also migratory which was not the case with aurochs, a species that evolved in the forest lands of northern Europe. Further, the wisent (European bison) was never domesticated. It is believed that aurochs were easier to keep in a pen and didn't evolve the tendency to try to smash through obstacles. This was probably because they evolved in forests and had to learn to maneuver around trees.
Europeans never domesticate aurochs either. They were brought to Europe by Middle Easterners.
The modern wisent has also never been domesticated because it's too aggressive. Wild auroch bulls were considered dangerous to hunt but they were also popular to hunt in part because of certain traits that made them easy to domesticate - they weren't very migratory, they'd stay in the same general area which made them easy for gameskeepers to point the nobles to where there was an auroch to kill. Also modern bulls are pretty aggressive and would be dangerous to hunt with primitive weaponry but the cows are docile. This variation in behavior between the genders is part of what made the auroch easy to domesticate, you could pen a group of cows and they would come to accept humans as their herd leader. Female bison are almost as aggressive as the males especially when they have a calf.
too dumb/weak and they didnt actually live around a lot of bison.
Horses were domesticated by strong and intelligent people who lived on the steppe since the Mesolithic.
Amerinds didnt live around Bison until about the 1600s and they would need a big IQ and strong spirit (like Gravettian tier) to actually domesticate them in the 200-300 years prior to their race war with the Aryans.
>Semitic people domesticated the Auroch first!!!
Lol. Lmao, even.
>The only reason I've heard is that they're too big and aggressive
Have you seen a bison in person?
They're fricking enormous and belligerent. If you kill the bull, they just fight for another one, and they'll charge you just for getting too close. Bison will frick you up, and to imagine you could just walk up to them with stone age tools and stick them on a plow is moronic
>There is a third kind, consisting of those animals which are called uri. These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this kind of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments.
t. Caesar