Whose Donkey? Domestication and Variability

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Morphological, genetic, ethnographic and behavioral research on domestication has provided a basis for understanding variability in the process of donkey domestication. It is clear that the lack of herd-based sociality among wild relatives of the donkey and people’s reliance on donkeys for transport create distinctive pathways for domestication of these animals. Here I explore dimensions of variability in the selection processes operating on donkeys in space and time. Donkey domestication has diverse geographic and cultural roots within Africa and Asia, and had different trajectories within pastoral and urban communities. Donkeys became fundamental to life among historic mobile communities in Iran and Afghanistan as well as Africa. They were used in Bronze Age trade routes of southwest Asia. What role, if any, did they play along the Himalaya range and the Proto-Silk Route? In Africa, how did donkeys become incorporated into the varied communities that developed as pastoralism spread from northeast to eastern Africa? Unlike dogs or horses there has been little intensive selection of donkeys until modern times. Long term gene flow and highly variable selection patterns make domestication of donkeys an extreme example that contributes to thinking about animal domestication broadly.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Questioning the Fundamentals of Plant and Animal Domestication   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24269