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Animal husbandry did not start in Africa, though. It started in the fertile crescent and spread into Africa. This is very well attested in archaeological finds,
by Tuna-Fish 2y ago
Animal husbandry did not start in Africa, though. It started in the fertile crescent and spread into Africa. This is very well attested in archaeological finds, and in the fact that the relevant animals were domesticated first there.
The surprising news is that the spread of animal husbandry didn't seem to accompany the spread of human genes -- the subsistence strategy was adopted by learning, not by people moving.
I don't think this is very shocking because the same thing seems to have happened elsewhere. While agriculture mostly spread by people moving, the culture that developed into all the pastoral cultures of the Eurasian steppe seem to have been hunter-gatherers living in close proximity to farmers.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoBut how does that prove there was no animal husbandry in Africa in the prior hundreds of thousands of years?
- jjk7 2y agoBecause there's no evidence of it until after it was developed outside of Africa? You don't have to prove something that doesn't exist. Find the evidence, and prove it does.
- Tuna-Fish 2y agoAnimal husbandry leaves behind a lot of evidence, starting from different distributions of animal ages and sexes found in bones in refuse pits, to genetic evidence of artificial selection. This evidence is found everywhere. But it's dateable, and you can find the oldest instances of it in the fertile crescent.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoDo you really need me to remind you that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
- throwee2000 2y agoMaybe “burden of proof” is a phrase to get re-acquainted with? Why do you think an apparently unsubstantiated alternative should be considered despite the archeological record?
- MichaelZuo 2y agoWho said I wanted to prove it did happen? You cannot prove it didn’t happen, and I also don’t think it was that likely. Both can be true.
- fc417fc802 1y agoI also can't show conclusive evidence that there wasn't a continent of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic 10k years ago that mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Yet if someone enters a conversation about geography with me and inquiries about Atlantis I'm probably going to tell them that it never existed without bothering to wrap that statement in multiple layers of clarification about the evidence and probability estimates and highly unlikely contingencies. We can't prove that there wasn't some isolated genius who engaged in animal husbandry in Africa before everyone else but was ignored by the rest of his tribe or whatever. But we have managed to place some fairly low upper bound on how much of that could have been happening. At some point it is reasonable to conclude that your typical society in that time and place didn't have access to it.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoWell sure a very slim chance is a reasonable position.
- fc417fc802 1y agoNot in the way that people usually use those words. "Reasonable position" generally refers to a reasonable assumption to make or gamble to take. Something technically remaining within the realm of possibility is not that.