Is it true that the New World had no horses, cows, pigs or any animal that can be domesticated?

Jared Diamond trying to explain why Europeans were more advanced then natives and africans. His book "Guns, Germs, and Steel is utter shit and Anthropologists have disproven most claims made by the book but sadly most Americans take his work as fact due to it being turned into a movie on "history" channel which therefore means it's fact.
>Pic related it's some of his claims that where disproven

Though I need to correct myself here. There are theories that the domesticated dog is not from the domestication of wolves but another canid: a wild dog, if you will.

>that gif

It's from Arrested Development

Dogs were most likely brought over with them, no?

There are no domesticated fish today and there certainly wasn't any back then.
Same as insects. Bees can be kept, but they are not domesticated.

This is retarded

I wonder if the human race will be someday domesticated or tamed in a far future.

its from arrested development. dont worry

[citation needed]

The Native Americans had domesticated dogs by themselves. They were extensively used, even in North America. The chihuahua is probably a descendant of an Aztec dog.

On a semi-related note, does anybody else ever wonder what ancient Greek/Roman doggos looked like?
They were probably just mongrels, but it's fun to imagine they had different "lost to the ages" breeds and shit.

Natives rode bison.

WE

>Anthropologists

just more white appropriation

youtube.com/watch?v=iJ4T9CQA0UM

...

The Romans, at least, had a pretty extensive number of dog breeds IIRC.

No, but they literally invented corn.

>its an user doesn't know the difference between taming and domesticating episode

The former precedes the latter but Africans never even managed to get that far.

No, you dummy. A zebra can be trained, but not tamed. It is too stressed, on edge, aggressive, no pack mentality, doesn't follow a leader and so on.

lol no, they had buffalos, white people totally domesticated them, so indians have no excuse but their inferior genes.

The american bison is not domesticated, moron. Its too aggressive.

Goldfish, beta fish, koi fish all domesticated.

Bees and silkworms both domesticated.
What's super annoying is the fact that the closest relative to zebras and quaggas the donkey was domesticated by Africans already.

Like they domesticated an animal that was suitable, zebras weren't it.

Caribou is essentially the same animal as reindeer yet they failed to domesticate them, also moose can be domesticated also. Both could have been used for riding and as draft animals.

It isn't the same animal, and training an individual creature isn't the same as domesticating a species.

Moose have been domesticated and farmed in Russia as an experiment, not just tamed.

Using modern science, knowledge and tools, not on a large scale, and they are still not the same animal.

there's no way you could ride a reindeer or even a moose. unless you're a gnome.

Aztecs had no horses yet they had civilization, the redskins truely have no excuses.

You dont have to be a gnome its enough to just be Asian.

Bison were not domesticated, but they WERE managed in the way bees might be in ancient times... favourable conditions for them were maintained. Mostly in the form of 'controlled' fires. A burnt plain or forest springing back from a fire the season before will have millions of tasty young shoots for bison and deer to eat, instead of tough mature branches and grass stalks.

Trees/forests themselves were also extensively maintained across the eastern coasts of north america. Nut trees, trees useful for construction material or bows and arrows, etc. were selectively planted in groves.

I'm not a fan of the book either, and I actually read it when it first came out.

Number 6 is right though (not by Diamond's same logic though). The spread of diseases (ahead of actual Europeans) almost certainly massively thinned out native groups and led to multiple collapses. There is pretty good evidence of this in early explorer's accounts. Many (not all, but many) 'nomad' or hunter/gatherer native groups that the Europeans met had once been stationary agriculturalists only 200 years before, and had relapsed into an earlier state of civilization. That's how strong the disease shock was. It really shouldn't be understated.

Another factor is that most native americans are mostly descendent from the third (or fourth by some accounts) and last wave of mass migration into north america. This is your classic Beringia group from Siberia (i.e. not the Inuit, nor PNW groups who are "pure" final-wavers). They were basically one huge group of closely-related people, and they didn't have genetic defences to European or East Asian diseases. North American natives inherited this subpar defence, which is why relatively less deadly Eurasian diseases (cold, measles, various poxes) raped them so hard.

But otherwise, Diamond is a cock.

well okay, it might be possible if you're small, light-built human. but the ones who actually have practical uses for riding animals aren't some grannies or children but grown men doing lots of physical stuff.

The common donkey that we all know and love is actually originally from Somalia. Donkeys are desert equines, they also live wild in the Arabian peninsula, but it was in the Horn of Africa that they were domesticated and then extended out of Africa.

False. The program is not all that successful and the moose can in no way be said to be 'domesticated'.

The 'redskins' did have civilizations, you fool.

A bunch of nicely built huts in a place isnt a civilization user.

It's now coming to light that North American Indians had some pretty complicated cities and were really starting to get their civilisations going, they were Age of Empires style levelling up. Then unfortunately Europeans arrived and they all died from disease, no one bothered to record what they found and everything returned to the earth since they mostly built from wood rather than stone because wood was common and easier.

Pick is Cahokia in Ohio. All thats left is a gigantic buried pyramid which no one thought to look at until recently.

That looks cool as fuck

You could always breed the animal to be bigger over the generations.

>What I don't know isn't true!!
Still showing that ignorance, user. This is Veeky Forums, read up or fuck off.

Horses originally couldn't carry big men on their backs either, it took a long time to breed them to be strong enough.

The original wild Eurasian horse was sturdy enough. The central asians who domesticated them were also relatively small.

I wouldn't want to be one breaking in wild broncos though, Jesus. Wild horses will bite your face off if given the chance.

He's right about the disease, though. Smallpox fucked shit up in the Americas.

Who gives a fuck about those animals, we should be sending nukes in time machines until people from the past learn to domesticate cool animals like bears or crocodiles

It's debatable whether the plague was pre or post-columbian, though.

Greek Dogger from a Roman sculpture

The Mississippi cultures built dams and irrigation ditches and mounds, but they didn't always get it right, and flooding disasters did happen. With original Cahokia, my understanding was that mainly prolonged unfavourable weather patterns led to a decline (not good for the priest-kings claiming to control the sun and rains that do not come). That led to strife, either internal upset or outsiders picking off a now-weak state. Moundbuilding did remain as the civilizations splintered, as Spanish chronicles from the 1500s note. 200 years later, by the time American settlers were crossing over the Appalachians in large numbers, local natives didn't know much about the mounds. This suggests a massive upheaval in the time in between, and in fact we know it was contagious diseases from Euros.

I dont know what domestication means: the post

Wrong on almost all points. Sad that people will take this for fact without doing any research themselves.

Bullshit. Dogs were domesticated much earlier by humans in the old world and brought over to the new world.

>The Indus valley civilisation was destroyed by Indo-European barbarians.

I lol'd hard. I doubt anyone around here is going to deny that Jared Diamond's ideas are full of easily-poked holes, but this image should probably not be paraded as a well-thought-out antidote.

They had horses. They ate them all.

Well, if by domesticated you mean behaviorally deferent to humans and "tame", I guess you're right, but if there are some animals that could be thought of as "domesticated" without displaying those traits, it's because they're not really needed for humans to get what they want out of them. Salmon aquaculture is a huge industry these days, and the "domestic" farmed strains are larger and more disease-resistant.

And snails were almost certainly the first animal in history to be systematically managed by people. They were probably even selectively bred as far back as the Paleolithic, as circumstantially evidenced by most large preserved shell middens tending to show on average larger samples of snail than would likely have ever occurred "naturally" by chance in a given area.

Most of the megafauna of North America was already under climate stress when humans came over. Horses at the time were by now restricted mostly to the north west of the continent. Remains indicate, in fact, that humans and native north american horses overlapped for many thousands of years (unlike the rather short overlap of mammoth, mastodons, camels, giant ground sloths, etc). This would suggest it was not humans as the simple one sole reason for their extinction in the Americas. Humans certainly hunted and ate them though.

You've also got to remember that the total number of humans 20,000 years ago was pretty small. Probably in the 50-100k range max, in small hunting bands, until perhaps 3000-4000 years ago when agriculture kicked off.