If anyone posts this all they've done is demonstrate that they haven't read Guns, Germs and Steel.
Occasionally it is possible to tame a Zebra, especially if you're a handler paid to do so in a society which already has well established agriculture employed by someone with an appeal to novelty. Even so they've never been successfully domesticated. They're very difficult to capture alive and very difficult to put under control in no small part due to their aggressiveness. Zebras kill more zookeepers than any other creature. Even when 'tamed' Zebras are touchy creatures, note that the lady in this image is riding a cart pulled by a Zebra, not the Zebra itself.
Zebras were never domesticated for the same reason that European Bears were never domesticated (even though there have been instances of tamed bears). They're too much hassle to economically domesticate.
>>438980
>implying zebras can harm the human masterspecies
>>438980
Literally tamed aurochs.
>>438980
Domesticated is just taming + selective breeding + time
The wild ancestors of the domesticated horse were also large muscular pray animals can that could kill a man with one kick, horses today can still do that
Saying domestication was impossible is a cop-out
What does zebra taste like
White people tamed fucking aurochs, we could easily tame a fucking Zebra
>>439029
There is a market for zebra meat, mostly targeting muscleheads.
The Burchell zebra breed in South Africa is the only breed that can be legally farmed for meat.
I'd like to know what it tastes like too one day.
>>439033
>White people tamed fucking aurochs
No, they did not.
>>438980
Bears were never domesticated because a tamed bear serves no practical purpose.
What a shit comparison OP, you made a thread just for this? Get out.
>>439123
Meat and war animals. Bears breed quickly and are walking garbage disposals. That's one more reason to dometicate bears over pigs.
>>439029
it's basically mediocre horse meat
which in itself is mediocre beef
not really worth it
>>439161
There are superior animals for both of those purposes though.
>>439170
the best steaks are horse steaks though
>>438980
So what you've proven is that, despite the possibility of doing so, and the fact that it would be immensely useful to have domestic beasts of burden akin to horses, people who could have done it didn't bother because it was hard.
It must have been a cakewalk taming the things we did tame, considering how docile and totally non threatening bulls, wild stallions, wolves, and lynxes are.
>>439041
what would be interesting is a blind taste test trying to discern the difference between horse, donkey and zebra.
and utilizing all those delicious european horsemeat recipes for zebra and/or donkey.
i'm hungry now.
>>439181
>considering how docile and totally non threatening bulls,
Easy to manipulate due to their dominance oriented herd mentality.
>wild stallions,
See cattle, also the original breeds of domestic horse were smaller and easier to manage than modern horses and were raised for food
>wolves,
Have a social structure which integrates well with humans and are not that agressive outside hunting.
>and lynxes
Never domesticated
A better comparison would be ancient Europeans trying to domesticate the moose. Despite a century of efforts by the russians using 20th century technology have only produced marginal success at best.
It's kind of amazing to me that something as innocuous as animal husbandry has become a racism meme.
>>438980
>>438980
I have one animal for this debate: The donkey. Specifically it's wild ancestor, the Nubian Wild Ass.
I think that kinda blows them the fuck out, as they were domesticated.
I think a lot more emphasis should be placed in the "economically viability" of domestication.
Even if domesticating aurochs is harder than domesticating zebras, the reward is not only an animal with considerably more meat, but also milk.
Also of note is that Aurochs were not historically migratory, while zebra might perform the longest migration route of any land mammal. That alone means that you not only have to make the animal more docile with breeding, but also remove one of its most important survival instincts.
>>438980
>Even so they've never been successfully domesticated.
In what, the hundred and fifty years or so of half-assed efforts to do so? Give it a few dozen generations of intensive effort and check back.
>>439033
WE TAMED RABBITS UND SHIT
Animal behavior is pliable, but only to a limit.
Aurochs, wolves, wild boars, wild chickens, wild llamas etc. all had strong herding/flocking instincts and no strong fear of humans. Humans could eventually insert themselves into their social hierarchies as the dominant animals.
Gazelles, bears, lions etc. were around in the same areas that those other animals were. Humans in those areas had equal opportunity to domesticate them, but they couldn't.
We domesticated aurochs, donkeys, horses, and camels, which serve much the same purposes but have different strengths and weaknesses. Why not gazelles? Wouldn't a gazelle with something light strapped to its back be a perfect pack animal, able to go really fast?
But we didn't, because gazelles don't obey humans, are very difficult to breed in captivity, and are very difficult to keep penned.
Similarly, bears are not herd animals, so some other animal dominating them simply does not work. They would have been awesome guard animals and hunt animals. Can you imagine training a bear to obey hunting commands, like a dog can be trained? Fuck yeah. But no.
Out of the many, many large mammals that we could have made something useful of, only a handful were able to be made useful in this way. Zebras, rhinos, African elephants, hippos, Cape buffalo etc. simply couldn't be.
An interesting question is why there were so many large mammals in Africa that couldn't be domesticated. It may be that evolving side-by-side with hominids for twice as long as on other continents put selection pressure on them that tended to disfavor the characteristics that helped hominids domesticate the Eurasian mammals.
In this view, the mammals of Eurasia were in contact with hominids for a shorter time (about 2M years instead of more like 4M years) and so retained some of their herding and docility instincts. By the time fully modern humans came along, they were still pretty docile and those humans could exploit their docility.
Of course, it's possible to be too docile. The giant ground sloths and ungulates of North America might have been able to be domesticated, but their first contact with humans were with fully modern, technologically advanced hunter-gatherers that burned through them like napalm. The only domesticable large mammals left in the New World were the llamas way up in the Andes.
>>438980
So the fact Zebras can be domesticated proves what? That Jared was wrong about geography, and Africans are actually too stupid to figure out domestication on their own?
I guess I can live with that.
>>439872
There is a difference between taming and domestication. An individual animal can be tamed. Domestication happens over generations.
>>438980
>implying it's necessary to resort to 'muh tamed zebras' to shit on a trash pop historian like diamond
Anyone with a bachelors in history can refute that hack.
>>438986
>implying zebras can harm the human masterspecies
Well, yes.
>>440465
>newcastle fan
Holy shit, I'd hate to go on a safari with him, you can trace those mother fuckers by the long trails of spit they keep drooling.
>>438980
>Zebras were never domesticated for the same reason that European Bears were never domesticated (even though there have been instances of tamed bears). They're too much hassle to economically domesticate.
The fact that Zebras can be tamed without selective breeding just goes to show how retarded africans are. People didnt just fucking jump on a horse all of a sudden and go giddy up, they had to selectively breed it for a long time to make it suitable for riding.
tldr niggers are fucking retarded for not domesticating the zebra
>>439019
This
>>439019
>Domesticated is just taming + selective breeding + time
If that's true, then why can't I go out and buy a pet hunting cheetah?
>>438980
Reading guns germs and steel
Fucking pleb
>not reading based Acemoglu
>>438980
The real reason they didn't domesticate the Zebra is because domesticated animals elsewhere in the world spread rapidly into Africa and there was no need to domesticate native species thereafter. If the first native americans brought with them goats over the bering strait they wouldn't have bothered to domesticate the Llama.
The bantu expansion was facilitated by pastoralism (and agriculture). West African empires could field 10000s of cavalry but in wetter regions they are vulnerable to disease.
>>440602
>time
We have none (or at least that I have heard of) breed of cheetah that has been bred for generations to be as receptive and commandable as possible.
>>440667
We've had tamed bears and lions and elephants for centuries lad.
Where the fuck its my pet lion?
>just
>selective breeding
It's cute how you think that, but how are you gonna accomplish that with a species that doesn't reproduce in captivity?
Also I'm not sure you realize the timescale of domestication in the neolithic is way too short to create and select any new genes, meaning the potential for domestication already has to be there, in the species genome.
>>440677
>species don't reproduce in captivity
See Pandas
>>440688
or elephants
domestication after a country has reached industrial age is literally nothing.
>>440677
It took some 10,000 years to get the aurochs into something that could resemble cattle.
I don't think you really understand the time frame we're talking about here. Take everything that happened between Ovid's writing of the Metamorphoses and the election of Tarja Halonen as the first female president of Finland (2,000 years). Now multiply that by ten. For that entire time period, roughly the same amount of time between now and the earliest decipherable writing from Mesopotamia, humans were continuously and literally beating the aurochs into submission, playing god, and choosing the most viable offspring to reproduce thereby altering the aurochs at the genetic level into what we now think of as cattle.
Diamond's hamfisted attempt to disregard the role of genetics in humans is silly. He could have made a much more convincing case by simply saying Africa is really fucking big and Africans didn't have enough time to domesticate Zebras. Instead he says that genes are the sole determinant of domestication and that ancient wolves, aurochs, and warthogs were simply destined to be domesticated as they were somehow "genetically better". How he, and for that matter you, are able to with a straight face say genetics has nothing to do with human behavior and then turn around and say that animal behavior is solely based on genes is simply amazing.
>>440714
Well Pandas was my point.
They are very hard to breed in captivity, but we still fucking do it.
And it's not "us" unless you are from China.
Zebras can be bred in captivity much more easily than Pandas.
>>440498
Any animal can be tamed without selective breeding you idiot.
>>438980
>hurrpidy derrp taming and domestication iz hard
shit can be done is a human lifetime
>The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite," are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the tenth generation, 18 percent of fox pups were elite; by the 20th, the figure had reached 35 percent. Today elite foxes make up 70 to 80 percent of our experimentally selected population
What argument is this supposed to be making, and how does this fit into presupposed implications about niggers? Genuinely curious.
>>440822
The proposition is that niggers are dumb.
Diamond wants to say otherwise. His argument is basically that Europeans were playing life on easy mode.
One of Diamond's arguments is that the lack of the horse held Africa back. This is pretty much accepted everywhere, although large scale civilizations are entirely possible without any pack animal better than humans through semi-independent city states. This is exactly what the Meso-Americans and several African civilizations did.
But Africa has Zebras. Diamond argues that they are unfit for any interaction with humans what so ever. This is disproven by the fact that Zebras can very easily be tamed and made to act as a draft animal and even be ridden. They are still wild animals, are incredibly skittish, and can be tempermental however, but humans can still make use of them.
Thus, people who don't want to so much as consider the idea that maybe Sub-Saharan Africans really are dumb split hairs by saying that diamond meant they weren't UNTAMEABLE but rather UNDOMESTICATABLE.
This is usually countered by the fact that there is no animal that isn't domesticatable as domestication is outright genetic engineering (via selective breeding) to alter an animal into a more suitable form over a long period of time.
And then you get autists sticking their fingers in their ears and the commies start furiously shouting G-GO BACK TO /pol/ and then the nazis start calling everyone niggers and Jews and we're on 4chan so we all know how it ends.
>>440760
>It took some 10,000 years to get the aurochs into something that could resemble cattle.
Sauce on that? Are you saying the domestication of the auroch started BEFORE the neolihic? Because it seems you're full of shit.
>>440865
I was originally going to use dogs instead of cattle, but apparently botched changing it over.
The Auroch's was domesticated some 10,000 years ago, which means modern cattle have been the result of 10,000 or so years of selective breeding.
Which just lowers the time frame it takes to domesticate an animal and doesn't actually change anything.
>>440850
The problem with taming a wild animal is that it's dangerous, time consuming and that animal is always in danger of shaking itself loose of that conditioning and turning on you.
In a non-domesticated species, that animal is the rule and not the exception. In a domesticated species, that animal is the exception rather than the rule. That mean dog or stubborn horse that likes to throw riders.
Fucking hell you stupid fucks, Europeans themselves tried to domesticate zebras and failed.
During the colonisation of Africa a breed of horse that could effectively cope with the heat and have resistance to local parasites and diseases would have been critical, but very few actual horses like that existed. The solution? Domesticate zebras.
Despite extensive husbandry and great interest in both the colonial powers and a curious public, zebras didn't really get beyond the tame stage.
Regardless, some African kingdoms imported horses from Arabia anyway and even had a mounted class of elite warriors akin to knights.
>>440882
>The Auroch's was domesticated some 10,000 years ago, which means modern cattle have been the result of 10,000 or so years of selective breeding.
Pff, you're not saying anything there, just talking about selection for a species that has ALREADY been domesticated.
I'm pretty sure you're the one who's not aware of timescales here. The neolithic was a very short period. 2 millenia are not enough to just wait for completely new genes to dare appear in your would-be cattle.
>>440900
>The aurochs was already selected to be domesticated
You silly or something m8?
>>440911
Eh? I'm saying the auroch was domesticated 10 000 years ago. It didn't take 10 millenia to domesticate it, despite what you claimed earlier.
All you're saying is AFTER the domestication we spent 10 millenia selectively breeding it, which is a boring tautology and has nothing to do with the point.
>>440920
That's not me.
Anyways, domestication is not a switch you flip. It is a continous process. 10,000 years ago people began to tame and domesticate an unruly animal. You can nitpick about whether it took people with absolutely no knowledge of genetics and heredity 500 years, 1,000 years, 2,000 years, or however many years to reach the point at which the aurochs would stop trying to gore you and run away at the slightest provocation all you want. The point is that >>440677 severely underestimates how long domestication takes and expecting a handful of circus bears to produce such a startling difference as that between the aurochs and cattle in a few years is silly.
>>440810
>foxes and zebras are the same animals
>>440945
Plus, you should mention how the conditions of circus bears are not conducive to domestication.
Animals, surprise surprise, do not because docile and timid and human friendly when theyre abused.
domestication of the aurochs, and all neolithic/antiquity domesticated animals, occurred under at least less confined conditions and likely with the specific intent of enduring the animals to their master, for several generations.
>>440850
Too bad that there are actual pack animals domesticated in Africa, like subspecies of cattle only found down there, the donkey, and horses descended from Arabia.
Besides, if that's the case then Europeans are just as dumb, as most pack animals we consider European are either Middle Eastern or Asian.
>>440850
How about framing the argument - why would sub saharan African's NEED domesticated horses? Africans DID domesticate sheep and cattle, like everyone else, so the argument of "hurr durr niggers cant into domestication" is invalid.
One needs to examine all the factors - especially geography - in order to understand why domesticated zebras were not a thing. For one, the region lies within biome extremes - massive deserts to lush jungle with some savanna in between. You also had fucking terrifying lions and shit that would invade your village because fuck you. So maybe the region was too hostile for European style agriculture - the Africans didn't eradicate their predators like the Europeans did hence the precarious balance between nature.
This predicates on an old geography no no, Environmental Determinism, which is only a shunned discourse because it was historically (and looking at /pol/, presently) used to justify racism. Humanity does have the capability to adapt to harsh climates, but a lot of that has to do with technology doing the job rather than evolution. Africans were evolutionary suited to live in their environment; it just so happened that it negated the want for more western accouterments, the lack of which pisses racists and cultural relativists off to no end. People need to stop placing values on the culture and societies of others, I don't care if this is PC thought, if it triggers you you are no better than an SJW faggot.
>>441041
>Muh racism
>The rant
>>440810
There's a couple things you are forgetting. I wish I'd saved my other post on this, but I'll try to recreate it.
Now, the Russian Domesticated Fox has gone through about 30-35 generations of selective breeding. Zebra mares can reproduce at about 3 years of age, males at 5 or 6. Considering we are breeding each new generation with its own, we can estimate it takes 5 years per generation. This works out to an average of 150 years to get zebras that are domesticated. Assuming methods in a non modern society aren't at the same level as ours, let's bump it up to 200 years. Doesn't seem like much, does it? That's 8 to 10 human generations. How likely is it that a family is going to keep breeding zebras undisturbed for 2 centuries?
>>441041
>You also had fucking terrifying lions and shit that would invade your village because fuck you.
Lions were present across southern Europe and Anatolia, too. They didn't seem to impede the domestication of livestock nor the development of advanced civilization.
> why would sub saharan African's NEED domesticated horses? Africans DID domesticate sheep and cattle, like everyone else, so the argument of "hurr durr niggers cant into domestication" is invalid.
Widely accepted that domestication of cattle spread into Africa from the Near East. It wasn't an independent development in Africa.
>So maybe the region was too hostile for European style agriculture - the Africans didn't eradicate their predators like the Europeans did hence the precarious balance between nature.
Ah, so Africans voluntarily subjected themselves to technological and civilizational stagnation because they revered nature. Fitting then they are often lumped in with useless natives like Amer-Indians of North (not Meso) America, and abos.
>>440945
>Anyways, domestication is not a switch you flip
It absolutely is. There is a very clear distinction between domesticated species and not domesticated species.
>The point is that >>440677 (You) severely underestimates how long domestication takes
The point is that you're wrong about that. The neolithic was a very short period and that's when the bulk of domestication happened.
The idea that you actually think we could domesticate bears if we wanted to is hilarious. Don't you think Indians have never wanted to domesticate elephants?
>>438980
I think the image was created to be humorous. It's a medium of expression often lost on autists such as yourself, though.
>>441185
>Widely accepted that domestication of cattle spread into Africa from the Near East. It wasn't an independent development in Africa.
basically every aspect of civilisation spread into europe from the middle-east, via greece and rome. i don't see how this is a point
>>441263
>basically every aspect of civilisation spread into europe from the middle-east, via greece and rome. i don't see how this is a point
>implying greece and rome arent europe
>>441270
it still arrived there from the middle east and wasn't an independent development. i'm not sure what you hoped to achieve with your post
>>438980
what the fuck no one ever said zebras couldn't be tamed... you can tame pretty much anything in the animal kingdom - from lions to bears.
but it makes no sense since they're a pain in the ass to tame and pretty much impossible to domesticate while giving little benefits for the tamers.
it makes no sense at all since you have easier, cheaper and downright better alternatives to any kind of task a zebra could be performing.
>>441274
Domestication of horses took place in Europe, cattle in the Near East and India independently, I think sheep in the Near East?
Africans didn't develop any domestication on its own, is the point.
>>441429
>Domestication of horses took place in Europe
Central Asia afaik.
The only domestication in Europe was the rabbit.
Also pretty sure the Guineafowl was domesticated in Africa.
>>439376
>Taming the Nubian Wild Ass
...I think I saw that thread on /gif/
>>441243
Foxes were domesticated in 50 years, given enough selective breeding i see no reason why bears can't be domesticated.
>>440602
Cheetah are easy to tame, the problem is how they mate.
>>440950
this
>>441358
probably horses were difficult to tame at first too. like any wild animal.
>>438980
