Comment by CRConrad
11 days ago
> as stated earlier this process took thousands of years.
Just because you repeat something doesn't make it true.[1] Do you have any actual support for your clam that it took thousands of years?
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[1]: Except for the Goebbelian definition of "true".
There was a russian scientist that did research on domestication of fox's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_K._Belyaev
He found that by breeding and selecting for the more human friendly animals they became tamer and tamer. Now they are to the point of domestication. True domestication as I have heard from some means that the animal cannot thrive in the wild as its wild counter part can. This is a technical labeling issue as in some dogs have reversed domestication on some islands etc.
The fox story in russia is interesting since they found that there was a reduction in adrenaline in the fox's as they became tamer and tamer. The reduction caused them to adopt traits similar to domesticated dogs: wagging tails, floppy ears, coat color change. They did embronic transplants and found wild mothers with tame embryo's raised tame offspring and the opposite was also true. So it was a genetic change that resulted in this taming. It only took 50 generations to result in the change.
It would not be that far off to think that humans gave food to cooperative animals and killed the aggressive ones.
Under labor conditions I would say at least 50 generations. But without these perfect conditions it is easy to imagine that it takes longer.
1) “Easy to imagine”? Idunno... What with the WP article showing how one guy got most of the way there in a single human lifetime (considerably less, actually, since he didn't start the project at birth), isn't it much easier to imagine that it would take just a few human lifespans?
2) Foxes. The plural is “foxes”. “Fox's” is the singular possessive, as in “Wow, look at that fox's beautiful pelt!”.
Fifty horse generations would span about 500 years. You can imagine that this would correspond to a few human lifespans, which could also fall in the range of 500 years, depending on the exact number of few. I think this is a reasonable lower bound.
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