GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

ZEBRAS AND UNHAPPY MARRIAGES • 165
stage in domestication. But pets have been reported from virtually all traditional
human societies on all continents. The variety of wild animals
thus tamed is far greater than the variety eventually domesticated, and
includes some species that we would scarcely have imagined as pets.
For example, in the New Guinea villages where I work, I often see people
with pet kangaroos, possums, and birds ranging from flycatchers to
ospreys. Most of these captives are eventually eaten, though some are kept
just as pets. New Guineans even regularly capture chicks of wild cassowaries
(an ostrich-like large, flightless bird) and raise them to eat as a delicacy—even
though captive adult cassowaries are extremely dangerous and
now and then disembowel village people. Some Asian peoples tame eagles
for use in hunting, although those powerful pets have also been known on
occasion to kill their human handlers. Ancient Egyptians and Assyrians,
and modern Indians, tamed cheetahs for use in hunting. Paintings made by
ancient Egyptians show that they further tamed (not surprisingly) hoofed
mammals such as gazelles and hartebeests, birds such as cranes, more surprisingly
giraffes (which can be dangerous), and most astonishingly hyenas.
African elephants were tamed in Roman times despite the obvious
danger, and Asian elephants are still being tamed today. Perhaps the most
unlikely pet is the European brown bear (the same species as the American
grizzly bear), which the Ainu people of Japan regularly captured as young
animals, tamed, and reared to kill and eat in a ritual ceremony.
Thus, many wild animal species reached the first stage in the sequence
of animal-human relations leading to domestication, but only a few
emerged at the other end of that sequence as domestic animals. Over a
century ago, the British scientist Francis Galton summarized this discrepancy
succinctly: "It would appear that every wild animal has had its
chance of being domesticated, that [a] few . . . were domesticated long
ago, but that the large remainder, who failed sometimes in only one small
particular, are destined to perpetual wildness."
DATES OF DOMESTICATION provide a third line of evidence confirming
Galton's view that early herding peoples quickly domesticated all big
mammal species suitable for being domesticated. All species for whose
dates of domestication we have archaeological evidence were domesticated
between about 8000 and 2500 B.C.—that is, within the first few thousand
years of the sedentary farming-herding societies that arose after the end