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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

I always thought the reason why many African creatures seem undomesticable is because humans have always been in Africa and co-evolved, so anything native became fierce and untrusting gradually as hunters improved. Seems obvious, but I am not a scientist, so maybe it is more complex.

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Some of the most popular pets and domestic animals came from the african continent in fact: the grey parrot, the domestic hedgehog, the gerbil, the camel, the fennec fox, the gambian giant rat, the ball python, the canary bird and of course the domestic cat

Some groups on the other hand are notoriously difficult to domesticate no matter the continent. Deer and Gazelles for example, too vicious when in heat or too fragile to be trusted in small closed spaces.

The problem with this argument is that we know what happened when humans met trusting animals: we ate them to extinction. So probably the horse’s ancestors were pretty fierce.

Perhaps when you're not such a good hunter, you tend more to use whatever you can catch for food. When you're an expert hunter, you start to think about other possibilities.

I believe Jared Diamond answers this question in Guns, Germs and Steel. Africans didn't have iron tools and were not as effective hunters, so the animals had a much longer time to adapt against their predators.

That issue is addressed by the co-evolution clause, which posits that the ancestors of modern Zebras underwent selective pressure for hostility and avoidance towards the ancestors of modern humans as the latter became more dangerous. (Note that the use of 'ancestor' here does not assume any position on whether these ancestors were a different species than their current descendants.)

I get that. It explains why the dodo was fearless, and all the american animals.

We ate all of them when we showed up, in the american case c. 10000BC, long before iron weapons.

My point is that if the wild horses we first met were similarly tame, then surely we would have eaten them too. We didn’t. So probably they weren’t.

So that can’t be what stopped us domesticating african animals.

Maybe what made Asian horses somewhat wary of Homo Sapiens when they showed up was their experience with previous migrations of hominids (Homo Erectus, Denisovans, Neanderthals). This would assume that these predecessors were less dangerous to horses than were the early humans in America, possibly because they were less widely or more thinly spread, or dispersed more slowly.

Or we ate them to massive multiplication and huge success (chicken, cows, pigs, goats, ducks, turkeys, sheeps...)

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