Gallery 15 of 16 · The puzzle

Why so few?

Thousands of species tried, fourteen large mammals kept: the Anna Karenina principle, its critics, the domestication syndrome and the tame foxes of Siberia.

About 10,000 to 4,000 years ago

Thousands tried, fourteen kept

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People hunted, penned or tamed hundreds of large wild mammals, yet only a handful became true domestic animals. Jared Diamond counted fourteen large plant-eaters domesticated before modern times: sheep, goat, cow, pig and horse (the "major five"), plus the dromedary and Bactrian camels, the llama and alpaca, the donkey, the reindeer, the water buffalo, the yak, the Bali cattle (banteng) and the mithan (gayal).

Why did a few species carry the farming world while hundreds of others never made the move?

Sources: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), ch. 9 "Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle"; Larson and Fuller, "The Evolution of Animal Domestication," Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 45 (2014)

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Diamond, 1997

The Anna Karenina principle

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Diamond borrowed Tolstoy's line that happy families are all alike: a domesticable animal must pass every test, and failing any one is enough to fail. His six tests: a diet people can supply cheaply; fast growth; willingness to breed in captivity; a manageable temper; no tendency to panic and bolt; and a social life with a herd and a leader that humans can take over.

Pick a wild animal you know. Which of the six tests would it fail first?

Sources: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), ch. 9

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Asia and Africa

Tamed is not domesticated

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An Asian elephant can be trained for logging or war, but for most of history working elephants were caught wild and trained one by one, because they breed slowly and rarely in captivity. Zebras were tried as carriage animals in colonial Africa; they bite, kick and dodge the lasso, and none was ever bred into a docile domestic line. Taming changes one animal; domestication changes a whole bloodline over many generations.

Why does the difference between taming and domestication matter for a farmer?

Sources: Larson and Fuller (2014), Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), ch. 9

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A debate

Critics of the list

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Archaeologists say domestication was not a single test an animal passed but a long relationship that took different paths: commensal (animals drawn to human camps, like wolves and wild boar), prey (hunted animals managed into herds, like sheep and goats), and directed (people deliberately taming a species, like horses). Critics also warn that a list of "suitable" species can be misread as a ranking of peoples. Africa, for example, domesticated the donkey and its own cattle and guinea fowl.

Is domestication something an animal is suited for, or something people and animals did together?

Sources: Larson and Fuller (2014), "The Evolution of Animal Domestication"; Melinda A. Zeder, "Pathways to Animal Domestication," in Biodiversity in Agriculture (Cambridge, 2012)

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Darwin, 1868 · Wilkins and colleagues, 2014

The domestication syndrome

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Darwin noticed that very different domestic animals share traits their wild cousins lack: floppy ears, patchy coats, shorter faces, smaller brains and teeth, and a longer, playful youth. In 2014 Adam Wilkins, Richard Wrangham and Tecumseh Fitch proposed one cause: selecting for tameness quietly reduces a group of embryo cells (the neural crest) that also build ears, skin color, face and teeth.

Look at a dog and a wolf side by side. Which differences fit the syndrome?

Sources: Wilkins, Wrangham and Fitch, "The 'Domestication Syndrome' in Mammals," Genetics 197 (2014); Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868)

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Novosibirsk, from 1959

Sixty years of tame foxes

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In 1959 the Soviet geneticist Dmitry Belyaev began breeding silver foxes on a farm in Siberia, keeping only the calmest pups as parents. Within a few dozen generations many foxes wagged their tails, sought people out, and some showed piebald coats and floppy ears. Lyudmila Trut carried the experiment on for decades. It showed that selecting for temper alone can bring a cluster of domestic traits.

What does the fox farm suggest about how the first wolves became dogs?

Sources: Lyudmila N. Trut, "Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment," American Scientist 87 (1999); Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut, How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) (2017)

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