Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond

STILL A FOURTH line of evidence that some mammal species are much more suitable than others is provided by the repeated independent domestications of the same species. Genetic evidence based on the portions of our genetic material known as mitochondrial DNA recently confirmed, as had long been suspected, that humped cattle of India and humpless European cattle were derived from two separate populations of wild ancestral cattle that had diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago. That is, Indian peoples domesticated the local Indian subspecies of wild aurochs, Southwest Asians independently domesticated their own Southwest Asian subspecies of aurochs, and North Africans may have independently domesticated the North African aurochs. Similarly, wolves were independently domesticated to become dogs in the Americas and probably in several different parts of Eurasia, including China and Southwest Asia. Modern pigs are derived from independent sequences of domestication in China, western Eurasia, and possibly other areas as well. These examples reemphasize that the same few suitable wild species attracted the attention of many different human societies.