dogs are a bit older than other domestic animals but i hesitate to put too much meaning in dates that can vary 1,000 years in a period where the biggest advancements are in ways to put stone-headed sticks into things. i’m a firm believer in animal agriculture being after plant agriculture ofc but that hypothesis does imply some symbiosis with the progenitors of domestic species, so it’s hard to say how different that is.
Dogs were domesticated prior to agriculture and there’s evidence of that. You maybe just don’t know shit about anthropology and when and how different animals were domesticated.
i know that, but how little we know about domestication and stone age shit shouldn’t give one confidence in making huge character differences between how different animals were domesticated originally. nobody wrote down that dogs are friends but cow-aurochs are food. could aurochs or horses be a benefit to have around the agricultural community before domestication? we don’t know
There are wild populations descended from the same ancestors as horses and dogs, those are not the same thing as wild horses and dogs. They have fundamental biological and behavioral differences.
Yes, domesticated horses and dogs can interbreed with their wild counterparts, but at that point you’re getting into the “What is a species?” question. Polar bears and grizzly bears can interbreed just fine if they’re in the same place, same for chimps and bonobos.
And for horses there aren’t even really still wild horses. There’s Przewalski’s horse, but they separated from the ancestors of domestic horses long before domestication. They have a different number of chromosomes. Whatever wild horse populations we originally took the first horses from are long extinct.
dogs are a bit older than other domestic animals but i hesitate to put too much meaning in dates that can vary 1,000 years in a period where the biggest advancements are in ways to put stone-headed sticks into things. i’m a firm believer in animal agriculture being after plant agriculture ofc but that hypothesis does imply some symbiosis with the progenitors of domestic species, so it’s hard to say how different that is.
Dogs were domesticated prior to agriculture and there’s evidence of that. You maybe just don’t know shit about anthropology and when and how different animals were domesticated.
i know that, but how little we know about domestication and stone age shit shouldn’t give one confidence in making huge character differences between how different animals were domesticated originally. nobody wrote down that dogs are friends but cow-aurochs are food. could aurochs or horses be a benefit to have around the agricultural community before domestication? we don’t know
There are literally still wild horses and dogs.
There are wild populations descended from the same ancestors as horses and dogs, those are not the same thing as wild horses and dogs. They have fundamental biological and behavioral differences.
Yes, domesticated horses and dogs can interbreed with their wild counterparts, but at that point you’re getting into the “What is a species?” question. Polar bears and grizzly bears can interbreed just fine if they’re in the same place, same for chimps and bonobos.
And for horses there aren’t even really still wild horses. There’s Przewalski’s horse, but they separated from the ancestors of domestic horses long before domestication. They have a different number of chromosomes. Whatever wild horse populations we originally took the first horses from are long extinct.