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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

> According to Occam's razor, it is very unlikely that it happened twice in history

Is it? Sure, if you start with "we have domesticated horses, how did we get here" then "one event happened" are less assumptions than "two events happened". But if you start the other way around with "humans lived in vicinity of a species that lends itself to domestication" then "they only domesticated it once" sounds like the wild speculation.

Even if you assume exchange between the two civilizations, spreading the idea that horses can be domesticated is much easier and lower friction than spreading actual domesticated horses. Especially with a mountain range involved and early generations of barely-domesticated horses.

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I think think the statement "humans lived in vicinity of a species that lends itself to domestication" is wrong. Horses do not lend itself to domestication, as stated earlier this process took thousands of years. No one would say, oh it just took humans a couple of thousands years todo X, well that was quiet easy.

> as stated earlier this process took thousands of years.

Just because you repeat something doesn't make it true.[1] Do you have any actual support for your clam that it took thousands of years?

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[1]: Except for the Goebbelian definition of "true".

There was a russian scientist that did research on domestication of fox's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_K._Belyaev

He found that by breeding and selecting for the more human friendly animals they became tamer and tamer. Now they are to the point of domestication. True domestication as I have heard from some means that the animal cannot thrive in the wild as its wild counter part can. This is a technical labeling issue as in some dogs have reversed domestication on some islands etc.

The fox story in russia is interesting since they found that there was a reduction in adrenaline in the fox's as they became tamer and tamer. The reduction caused them to adopt traits similar to domesticated dogs: wagging tails, floppy ears, coat color change. They did embronic transplants and found wild mothers with tame embryo's raised tame offspring and the opposite was also true. So it was a genetic change that resulted in this taming. It only took 50 generations to result in the change.

It would not be that far off to think that humans gave food to cooperative animals and killed the aggressive ones.

Under labor conditions I would say at least 50 generations. But without these perfect conditions it is easy to imagine that it takes longer.

1) “Easy to imagine”? Idunno... What with the WP article showing how one guy got most of the way there in a single human lifetime (considerably less, actually, since he didn't start the project at birth), isn't it much easier to imagine that it would take just a few human lifespans?

2) Foxes. The plural is “foxes”. “Fox's” is the singular possessive, as in “Wow, look at that fox's beautiful pelt!”.

Fifty horse generations would span about 500 years. You can imagine that this would correspond to a few human lifespans, which could also fall in the range of 500 years, depending on the exact number of few. I think this is a reasonable lower bound.

> Fifty horse generations would span about 500 years.

No, seems fifty horse generations would span about 100-150 years: https://thehorse.com/16463/when-are-fillies-fertile/

> Horses typically have an average lifespan of between 25-30 years, but some can live much longer or shorter than this. Some breeds have been known to live up to 40 years or even longer in captivity depending on the breed, management practices, and overall care. Others, as a result of breeding and selection may live much shorter lives.

Source: https://animalcorner.org/blog/horse-lifespan/

In the longest case, we could assume 50 x 30 = 1500 years. If you say that every generation came to live after 5 years, then 50 x 5 = 250 years. Again, you want to pick the absolute lowest bound (lowest number of generations) of the lowest bound (shortest years of generations) under labor conditions, which did not happen in reality. But if you think it took only 100-150 years to domesticate horses, then fine. I cannot provide a definite proof that you are wrong.

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