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On Getting the Horse to the Americas (History)
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Hatty wrote:
What about the husky, upon which the Inuit depend for transport?

Now you mention it, the husky counts as one of the technical innovations required to sustain the life-style. They don't lose body heat by lying in the snow until it reaches 50 below; and minus 10 is too warm for them: they prefer to run in minus 20 or lower! Perfect.

Pushing a few generations of dogs into colder and colder climes will do that, I suppose; which the people could only do because they had dogs (a suitable locomotive) that became better and better cold adapted. Innit?
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Komorikid


In: Gold Coast, Australia
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How does the Uffington Horse fit into all this? If the Mongols were so intent on keeping their horse culture secret how do you explain horses in Britain ca 1200 BC and horses pictured on Pre-Roman Briton coins.
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Mick Harper
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There's no doubt that horses were around in Europe early-doors. The question is: What were people doing with them? Your quoting of the date 1200 BC is particularly significant since this is the orthodox date for a very big change. Up to that point horses were used exclusively for military chariots (it is claimed because the horse was too small to be ridden). After that point, horses were used in the modern way as cavalry. It is a commentary on British backwardness that when the Romans arrived in nought BC, the Brits were still using chariots. And points to the probability that the Big Horse was acquired, directly or indirectly, from way out east (presumably the Asian steppe but maybe the North American steppe).

But all this is a long way short of a "horse culture". The horse in Europe was used exclusively for riding-by-nobs (whether as cavalry, as huntsmen or as fast-transport). It only became used for agriculture in the late medieval period. Only the Mongols used the horse 'democratically'.
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Mick Harper
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The horse, of course, is not the only anomalous animal in North America. There's also the beaver. Nobody thinks of this as anomalous because as an animal the beaver is so very normal, but the North American beaver does a remarkable and unique thing: it builds a dam and thereby decisively alters its own eco-niche...a very human trait. And not the most curious thing about this extraordinary behaviour is that there is absolutely no need to do it! All the other water-rodents in the world demonstrate that an undammed river provides everything any self-respecting water-rodent needs.

So let's, for a moment, assume that the North American beaver is a feral domesticate i.e. that Man trained the beaver to go round damming streams for his (Man's) purposes. To support this notion we need other examples of Man training water-rodents to do extraordinary things. I'll kick off with one:
The Chinese used to train sea-otters to herd fish for them. They even built their long-distance sampans with a special flooded compartment to keep their sea-otters in so they could have a constant supply of fresh fish.

This points perhaps to something else we might be looking at: creatures that can (unusually) flourish in both salt and fresh water. Sea-otters are surely in themselves unusual in this respect. But then again there are freshwater dolphins (also I believe a south-east Asian speciality) . And of course salmon, trout and eels who all have a very odd relationship both to Man and to salt/fresh water.
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Ishmael


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Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Shetland Pony:

Shetland ponies, also known as shelts, are small (about one meter from the ground to wither) but strong for their size. Ancient equids had lived in Shetland since the Bronze Age, and later breeders crossed them with ponies imported by Norse invaders. The islanders domesticated the resulting Shetland ponies.

These ancient "equids," that were supposedly native to a few tiny islands in the middle of the fucking North fucking sea (lol!), were suppposedly like Zebras -- wild horsey-looking things.

However, Wikipedia goes on to say:

The ancient ponies' roots are unknown, though it is believed that they are related to the ancient Scandinavian ponies from when the islands were joined with Scandinavia (up until 8000 BC). They were probably influenced by the Celtic Pony, taken by the Celts between 2000 and 1000 BC. The harsh climate and scarce food developed the ponies into extremely hardy animals.

Now...here's my idea.

Someone brought some Paliminos across the ocean from North America to a central-hub point for shipping. That central hub was the Shetland Islands. The Paliminos that remained on the island were later bred into "Toy Horses" by the islanders -- perhaps because the smaller sized animal could still be used for towing but likely required less food to maintain.

Apart from the size, aren't these really the same animal?

The hair color. The white splotchy markings on brown. The white-colored, lengthy mane (perfect for a rider to grip with his hands). To me, it's like someone took a Palomino Horse and miniaturized it. The Shetland Pony seems a kind of midget-Palomino.

Yet the Palomino is "native" to the great plains of North America and was supposedly descended from a horse introduced by the Spanish.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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These ancient "equids," that were supposedly native to a few tiny islands in the middle of the fucking North fucking sea (lol!)...

"Native"? You sure that's what they say?

"They were probably influenced by the Celtic Pony, taken by the Celts between 2000 and 1000 BC."

That's interesting: according to orthodoxy, there weren't any Celts between 2000 and 1000 BC!

Someone brought some Palominos across the ocean from North America to a central-hub point for shipping. That central hub was the Shetland Islands. The Palominos that remained on the island were latter bred into "Toy Horses" by the islanders -- perhaps because the smaller sized animal could still be used for towing but likely required less food to maintain.

This is too big a subject for this thread, but until we have a more satisfactory history of horses under our belt, consider:
-- palomino is a breed and its colouring is maintained according to the rules -- and without much white allowed. Other than that, they're just "horse-coloured" (which doesn't cover a terribly wide spectrum), so I'm not sure that you need to focus particularly on palominos.
-- the Shetlands/Orkneys aren't especially central or hubby. If they could make it across the Atlantic at will, wouldn't they go straight for somewhere "worthwhile"?
-- what happened to the horses that remained everywhere they were shipped to? The Shetlands don't have to have been a hub (for traffic in either direction) for horses isolated there to have followed their own historical path.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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This page is quite interesting (also from other, Applied Epistemological, perspectives):
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/reviews/05_09_raisor.htm


And in mtDNA analysis, the best known recent example is the misinterpretation of the molecular evidence published by Vil� et al. in their Science paper of 1997, in which they stated that the split between the wolf and the dog occurred c. 135,000 years ago. It is now considered that Vil� et al., in arriving at this date, did not take into due account the probable errors in their estimates, particularly in the calibration point between the outgroup and the wild ancestor, ie the one million years that was taken as the time of split of an ancestral canid into the separate species of coyote and wolf (see Dobney & Larson, in press).


There's that "all ancestor species must be extinct: mother and daughter species do not co-exist" principle again.

Wouldn't it be nice to know what a more acceptable figure is considered to be? Still, she's using scientific rigour to cover up a prejudice here.

Accounting for a "probable error in a calibration point" does not mean saying "we're probably wrong about this"; it means "we're taking 1 million years as nominal, but it might have been as early as X or as late as Y". Which means 1 million years -- selected for some reason -- is still a reasonable in-the-ball-park figure (for the wolf-coyote divergence).

And if I read this right, they're saying comparison of mtDNA suggests that dogs split from wolves 7 or 8 times more recently than coyotes did {except this time, wolves and dogs are allowed to co-exist}. If you move the calibration point, you move the point derived from it. If dogs-as-distinct-from-wolves are only 15,000 years old, then wolves-as-distinct-from-coyotes are only c. 110,000 years old (the same 7 or 8 times older). But if 1 million (or 10 million) years is reasonable for one then, according to Vil� et al., 135,000 (or 1,350,000) years is reasonable for the other. Someone just doesn't like these figures for dogs.

However, Raisor has a bias in her thinking about the evolution of the domestic dog that I have commonly heard from dog breeders, but never from biologists, and that is that the wolf could not be the direct progenitor of the dog because there are too many differences in their behaviour.

Fair enough: our intuition can prove to be wrong.

Raisor goes wrong in arguing at length against various theories about the domestication process, which as far as I know, no scientist has ever put forward, such as, 'what would the advantage be for early man to bring a dangerous carnivore into its camp and condition it to have no fear of humans?'


A philosopher wouldn't hesitate to present views that may or not actually be held by anyone for the purposes of argument and exposition. I don't see what's wrong with her exploring the possibilities in order to support the soundness of her conclusions.

And again, no archaeozoologist would admit to holding the simplistic view that, as early as 15,000-135,000 years ago, humans would or could have intentionally captured, tamed or controlled wild wolves, and then selectively bred them to produce dogs.


AAARRRGGGHHH!!! It's too simplistic to suppose that people were people?

"You can't assume..."
Bollocks. You can't do anything but assume. That is the underlying principle of all rational undertakings.

she suggests these changes were a result of natural evolution in a changing environment and had nothing to do with human intervention (p. 84). On p. 86 it transpires that she sees this changed environment not as the natural world but as the surroundings of human camps where the canids that were transitional between wolves and dogs scavenged.


Even basic logic is slack here. She says the humans were independent of the dogs as far as they both were concerned, but the humans had an environmental influence nonetheless. There is no contradiction there.

she doesn�t mention the salient point that in order for changes in the genetic constitution of an organism to be inherited, and thereby to evolve into a new form, there has to be reproductive isolation from its ancestral population.


She can add that to the second edition easily enough: if the contrast between the human environs and the wilderness is stark and individuals prefer or adapt to one or the other, then reproductive isolation from the ancestral population is likely to occur.

Blinding yourself with science is a much greater crime than trying it on someone else. {Is that an AE principle?}

it is essential that they should be written by a scientist... It is also essential that both sides should be expertly refereed...

I think not.
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Mick Harper
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A very elegant dissection, Dan. It is nice to have a wild THOBR guess to be found not so wild after all. In THOBR I pointed out that feline palaeontologists (or canid palaeontologists in this case) can hardly exist as a specialism in its own right, and palaeontological generalists are very unlikely to know as much about feline (or in this case canide) morphology as cat- (or in this case dog-) breeders. And yet we all have to bow down to palaeontologists on all questions of animal morphology.

Blinding yourself with science is a much greater crime than trying it on someone else. {Is that an AE principle?}

I think it probably is. Though the actual principle is probably that of denying the status of 'scientist' to the someone else.
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EndlesslyRocking



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This thread got me thinking about the Mongols. Maybe I've been influenced by the commercial on YouTube for Fomenko's books, but I wonder if there ever was a Mongol Empire. From what the commercial says, I think he proposes that they were pre-Russians.

But I wonder if all they were was a group of brutal mercenary tax-collectors, and all the great empire stuff is an interpretation. Much like if you started hiring Gypsy bands all over Europe to rob people, you would have lots of reports of people being robbed, but that doesn't mean there was a Gypsy empire.

Let's just play along for a moment. If they were just mercenaries, then who hired them. Maybe these guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaiologan_army#Alliance_with_the_Mongols

This is just random guessing of course - when I went to school, history started at the dawn of the French Revolution and only included the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, WWI, WWII, and the FLQ crisis. So my viewpoint is rather myopic.
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