Our Ancestors First to Domesticate Donkeys?

[The alchemist]

The research further solidifies my past claims that ancient Cushites were the first to domesticate the donkey ~5000 BCE, possibly for drought adaptation better framed as local contingent responses to large-scale climatic change. It makes sense why our ancestors had high mobility migrational capability, with the Equidae helping carry things with transportation of goods and people, not to mention the animals used in agricultural activities and construction. The animal had a considerable impact on the lifeways of food-producing peoples and the growing complexity of denser living conditions with their physical demands. The particular mammal was the first beast of burden, primarily spread rapidly in the early Bronze Age and eventually ended up all the way in the northeast of Asia. These equids changed people's lives drastically -- horses, after all -- did not appear domesticated for thousands of years later, according to the archeological record. Donkeys used to be valued highly by people in Northeast Africa and Near East compared to the modern era.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo3503

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[Shimbiris]

Nubia and Sudan in general was quite the pioneer in many ways. Wasn't it also a pioneer in regards to cattle domestication and pottery? Wallahi, our folk don't get the rep they deserve. Everyone's too erect for our Masri cousins.

 

[Prince of HS]

Donkeys are very useful in caaro madow ( muddy environments) hence why they are highly used and domesticated in the Shabellas and the Jubbas

 

[Moholin01]

Nubia and Sudan in general was quite the pioneer in many ways. Wasn't it also a pioneer in regards to cattle domestication and pottery? Wallahi, our folk don't get the rep they deserve. Everyone's too erect for our Masri cousins.

Didn’t that linguist Chris Ehret also imply that region developed monotheism? Somebody posted a passage from his book some time ago.

 

[Cognitive]

Nubia and Sudan in general was quite the pioneer in many ways. Wasn't it also a pioneer in regards to cattle domestication and pottery? Wallahi, our folk don't get the rep they deserve. Everyone's too erect for our Masri cousins.

I've seen the cattle study, they seem to have found some skeletons of domesticated aurochs.
Have the Polish team dated the remains yet?
Or are you speaking of the later domestication of cattle? I recall having read that Nabta Playa's cattle were not domesticated.

 

[Al-Ma'mun]

Nubia and Sudan in general was quite the pioneer in many ways. Wasn't it also a pioneer in regards to cattle domestication and pottery? Wallahi, our folk don't get the rep they deserve. Everyone's too erect for our Masri cousins.

Apparently we adopted Pastoralism before we adopted Middle Eastern style Agriculture

 

[Shimbiris]

Apparently we adopted Pastoralism before we adopted Middle Eastern style Agriculture

Our pastoralist ancestors were grain-collectors. And likely did have some actual Neolithic farmer roots from Masr and Sham and may have practiced some rudimentary cultivation as well. But proper developed agriculture in the Horn seems a later import from Sudan that probably brought our own E-Z813 Y-DNA.

Our earliest ancestors would've been herding cattle, goats, sheep and donkeys alongside shepherd dogs and probably even riding their cattle/oxen while collecting grains along the way. They were the source of the obsession with burial mounds, dolmens, stelae, rock-carvings and cave-paintings as well. Would've also been using domed mat-tents as well by the looks of it and overtime their progeny spread seemingly as far as Yemen, Chad and Southern Africa before being overtaken and assimilated by other linguistic groups.

 

[Al-Ma'mun]

Our pastoralist ancestors were grain-collectors. And likely did have some actual Neolithic farmer roots from Masr and Sham and may have practiced some rudimentary cultivation as well. But proper developed agriculture in the Horn seems a later import from Sudan that probably brought our own E-Z813.

Our earliest ancestors would've been herding cattle, goats, sheep and donkeys alongside shepherd dogs and probably even riding their cattle/oxen while collecting grains along the way. They were the source of the obsession with burial mounds, dolmens, stelae, rock-carvings and cave-paintings as well.

What I meant was before the Levantine Neolithic Package arrived in Egypt, that in Sudan and parts of modern Egypt, cattle pastoralists already existed.We or @Nilotic were probably the first to practice cattle pastoralism.

Also I have read from different sources that Egypt/Sudan might have developed Agriculture early on and independent of the Levant, then later on through tech diffusion and not a massive population migration into the Nile Valley did Neolithic Levantine Agricultural practices and animals were brought into Africa.

 

[Shimbiris]

What I meant was before the Levantine Neolithic Package arrived in Egypt, that in Sudan and parts of modern Egypt, cattle pastoralists already existed.We or @Nilotic were probably the first to practice cattle pastoralism.

Also I have read from different sources that Egypt/Sudan might have developed Agriculture early on and independent of the Levant, then later on through tech diffusion and not a massive population migration into the Nile Valley did Neolithic Levantine Agricultural practices and animals were brought into Africa.

We have read similar things I was hoping some chaps here would jog my memory on. Very busy with shaqo nowadays but inshallah I'll do some rereading in due time.

 

[Cognitive]

What I meant was before the Levantine Neolithic Package arrived in Egypt, that in Sudan and parts of modern Egypt, cattle pastoralists already existed.We or @Nilotic were probably the first to practice cattle pastoralism.

I am a bit confused here, but does pastoralism require domesticated cattle?
For instance, from studies I've read, the cattle found in Nabta Playa seemed to me morphologically wild.

 

[Moholin01]

Our pastoralist ancestors were grain-collectors. And likely did have some actual Neolithic farmer roots from Masr and Sham and may have practiced some rudimentary cultivation as well. But proper developed agriculture in the Horn seems a later import from Sudan that probably brought our own E-Z813 Y-DNA.

Our earliest ancestors would've been herding cattle, goats, sheep and donkeys alongside shepherd dogs and probably even riding their cattle/oxen while collecting grains along the way. They were the source of the obsession with burial mounds, dolmens, stelae, rock-carvings and cave-paintings as well. Would've also been using domed mat-tents as well by the looks of it and overtime their progeny spread seemingly as far as Yemen, Chad and Southern Africa before being overtaken and assimilated by other linguistic groups.

Do you believe there were Cushites in Yemen?

 

[Shimbiris]

Do you believe there were Cushites in Yemen?

Would be hard to explain why the Modern South Arabian languages (not descendants of OSA) have Cushitic substratums that are in fact very real. I lost the paper but there is archaeological evidence as well that the Horn influenced pre-historic Yemen in that rock-art and stelae culture associated with Horn-African (Cushitic) pastoralist spread to Yemen. It seems very much like Cushites expanded into Yemen before being overrun and absorbed by expanding Semites from the Fertile Crescent like the ancestors of Mehris, Soqotris and the like.

 

[Cognitive]

Would be hard to explain why the Modern South Arabian languages (not descendants of OSA) have Cushitic substratums that are in fact very real. I lost the paper but there is archaeological evidence as well that the Horn influenced pre-historic Yemen in that rock-art and stelae culture associated with Horn-African (Cushitic) pastoralist spread to Yemen. It seems very much like Cushites expanded into Yemen before being overrun and absorbed by expanding Semites from the Fertile Crescent like the ancestors of Mehris, Soqotris and the like.

So does this mean some minor SSA admixtures found in Mehris are in fact relics from prehistoric times?
Also, what likely caused PPNB-related groups to enter Arabia? Perhaps they got pushed out by some strongly Iranian specimens like the Sumerians?

 

[The alchemist]

Nubia and Sudan in general was quite the pioneer in many ways. Wasn't it also a pioneer in regards to cattle domestication and pottery? Wallahi, our folk don't get the rep they deserve. Everyone's too erect for our Masri cousins.

Pottery is an interesting case. The ceramic pots used to secure food and cooking were found earliest over 10,000 BP in Sudan (Dotted Wavy Line, and Wavy Line) by hunter-gatherer/fisher peoples – this was, from a time perspective, millennia earlier than the Levant and adjacent eastern culture/subsistence transition lineages. What is important to note in this matter, pottery uncovered in China dated 20,000 years old.

Due to deteriorating pasture conditions, demographic selection went toward a wild direction in recurrent pulses throughout the generations indicated in a complex multistage process due to the animals dying, the causative agent put forth by environmental pressures decreasing the carrying capacity of the geographic place. The patterns of selection in this landscape trigger for a need to increase robusticity, greater size, wild physiological/morphological and behavioral edge that can withstand harsh conditions, so such selection mechanisms, in my opinion, needs to trigger to defend against drought conditions as well as disease resistance. What is put weight upon is the idea that domestication is neither linear nor iterative.

Stable directional selection placement or isolation is needed, and people in the Late Pleistocene were not sedentary. This meant as they moved, the aurochs might have mixed continuously with their wild counterpart and retained wild-like characteristics – this might in a contradictory way given them an edge for the specific heterogeneous diverse subsistence lifestyles of a moving people with seasonal sedentary settlement situation where there was some nice frequency adaptation for the animal to cope with both sides, multi-specialized behavioral spectrum. The latter is just a thought. This model presents new dynamic variation inter-play; I believe the ideas we have been informed by not-so-representative sedentary faring observations in the modern era. It lacks proper explication.

And if that happened, we can be looking at a longer time window that stretches millennia before the known agricultural correlational domestication where you see traditional co-evolutionary dynamics among those animals, guided by various mechanisms that lead to size reduction and behavioral change. In these kinds of fields, people, especially the experts, have this way of underestimating something that pre-supposes and often potentially overturns their semi-coherent narrative, but when the object of discussion is backed by undeniable evidence, everyone suddenly acts like it was a matter of fact all along -- there is a sort of powerful hindsight bias people with operating in these inter-disciplinary discussional spheres carry that is limiting the discussion for no good reason. Frankly, it is a mode of operation to save face and retain large egos giving them room to dictate the parameters of discussion favoring their antiquated ideas, at the same time, posing as forward-thinking people that “only follows where the evidence leads them”.

Size reduction is not a useful indicator of signs of early domestication. There were regional variations, the Egyptian long-horn cattle had size that overlapped with the wild cattle population.

Before they officially took up cattle domestication, our ancestors relied upon diversified economic subsistence strategies that were increasingly delayed return and not immediate or egalitarian, as many think. One massive evidence of this is, again conveniently, the use of pottery. The second is, of course, the environmental conditioning, which I think was harsh, unpredictable with regards to precipitation, and hard extremely to live outside specific areas because of punishing aridification.

Morphological change of distinct physiological and/or behavioral domesticatory characteristics is not required. That bar is unrealistic to meet. Conveniently to draw a parallel, the donkey was morphologically wild (still retains wild qualities to this day) several thousand years post-domestication. The conversation around why this is the case is complex and multi-faceted, heterogeneous factors that centrally coordinate to one point, that is, for survival reasons of the early pastoralist. Phenotypical morphology indicative of wild adaptation can stay latent. A reasonable factor can be a lack of stable isolation given the mobile-dependent lifeways which presented issues for possible long-term directional control, at the same time, having a wild edge early on was possibly the best thing because the earliest extent in conditions and used the animals for reasons that helped them specifically.

I think Tuaregs still capture feral animals to domesticate them, and I seem to remember once reading that Bejas encourage introgression between domesticated and wild counterparts across the region to produce for better fitness traits according to the needs of demands from the environmental conditionings, better diseases resistance and, of course, for strength and endurance. It has been proven that, without selective breeding, directional selection might not happen even without gene flow from a wild population.

 

[Shimbiris]

Pottery is an interesting case. The ceramic pots used to secure food and cooking were found earliest over 10,000 BP in Sudan (Dotted Wavy Line, and Wavy Line) by hunter-gatherer/fisher peoples – this was, from a time perspective, millennia earlier than the Levant and adjacent eastern culture/subsistence transition lineages. What is important to note in this matter, pottery uncovered in China dated 20,000 years old.

Due to deteriorating pasture conditions, demographic selection went toward a wild direction in recurrent pulses throughout the generations indicated in a complex multistage process due to the animals dying, the causative agent put forth by environmental pressures decreasing the carrying capacity of the geographic place. The patterns of selection in this landscape trigger for a need to increase robusticity, greater size, wild physiological/morphological and behavioral edge that can withstand harsh conditions, so such selection mechanisms, in my opinion, needs to trigger to defend against drought conditions as well as disease resistance. What is put weight upon is the idea that domestication is neither linear nor iterative.

Stable directional selection placement or isolation is needed, and people in the Late Pleistocene were not sedentary. This meant as they moved, the aurochs might have mixed continuously with their wild counterpart and retained wild-like characteristics – this might in a contradictory way given them an edge for the specific heterogeneous diverse subsistence lifestyles of a moving people with seasonal sedentary settlement situation where there was some nice frequency adaptation for the animal to cope with both sides, multi-specialized behavioral spectrum. The latter is just a thought. This model presents new dynamic variation inter-play; I believe the ideas we have been informed by not-so-representative sedentary faring observations in the modern era. It lacks proper explication.

And if that happened, we can be looking at a longer time window that stretches millennia before the known agricultural correlational domestication where you see traditional co-evolutionary dynamics among those animals, guided by various mechanisms that lead to size reduction and behavioral change. In these kinds of fields, people, especially the experts, have this way of underestimating something that pre-supposes and often potentially overturns their semi-coherent narrative, but when the object of discussion is backed by undeniable evidence, everyone suddenly acts like it was a matter of fact all along -- there is a sort of powerful hindsight bias people with operating in these inter-disciplinary discussional spheres carry that is limiting the discussion for no good reason. Frankly, it is a mode of operation to save face and retain large egos giving them room to dictate the parameters of discussion favoring their antiquated ideas, at the same time, posing as forward-thinking people that “only follows where the evidence leads them”.

Size reduction is not a useful indicator of signs of early domestication. There were regional variations, the Egyptian long-horn cattle had size that overlapped with the wild cattle population.

Before they officially took up cattle domestication, our ancestors relied upon diversified economic subsistence strategies that were increasingly delayed return and not immediate or egalitarian, as many think. One massive evidence of this is, again conveniently, the use of pottery. The second is, of course, the environmental conditioning, which I think was harsh, unpredictable with regards to precipitation, and hard extremely to live outside specific areas because of punishing aridification.

Morphological change of distinct physiological and/or behavioral domesticatory characteristics is not required. That bar is unrealistic to meet. Conveniently to draw a parallel, the donkey was morphologically wild (still retains wild qualities to this day) several thousand years post-domestication. The conversation around why this is the case is complex and multi-faceted, heterogeneous factors that centrally coordinate to one point, that is, for survival reasons of the early pastoralist. Phenotypical morphology indicative of wild adaptation can stay latent. A reasonable factor can be a lack of stable isolation given the mobile-dependent lifeways which presented issues for possible long-term directional control, at the same time, having a wild edge early on was possibly the best thing because the earliest extent in conditions and used the animals for reasons that helped them specifically.

I think Tuaregs still capture feral animals to domesticate them, and I seem to remember once reading that Bejas encourage introgression between domesticated and wild counterparts across the region to produce for better fitness traits according to the needs of demands from the environmental conditionings, better diseases resistance and, of course, for strength and endurance. It has been proven that, without selective breeding, directional selection might not happen even without gene flow from a wild population.

What a treatise, walaal. Truly. Still rereading to fully take it in. And I do imagine it would make sense to keep interbreeding with wild breeds. They would definitely have been hardier and one thing to maybe consider is that very early pastoralists like these wouldn't have had the sorts of population sizes of medieval and early modern Horners. They may have simply even noticed their livestock's bloodlines naturally thinning due to not enough of them being around and interbred with wild animals to combat that. It doesn't take long, from what I gather, to start noticing issues even with sizable domestic herds if you don't start throwing in new blood from time to time. It's a key part of maintaining livestock.