Rough Diamond

Academics with an idée fixe say strange things. Take Professor Jared Diamond for example. Desperately anxious to explain why Australian Aborigines kept no domestic animals other than dogs, and fearful we will think the worse of them for this, he announced in Guns, Germs and Steel that Australia “had no domesticable native mammals” before the arrival of Europeans.

That sounded odd. Should we assume he mistook the wombat sitting next to him on the couch for a cushion? I would have thought that potentially domesticable animals were quite common in Australia. If raised from infancy in human company wallabys and kangaroos will hang around hoping to be fed, even though no special effort has been made to tame them. Sometimes you wish they would go away and leave you alone. But if they have grown up with a family then they feel they belong—and may even think that they are people too.

What emus think is hard to say, for the emu (a sort of ostrich) is a bird of little brain. But it too will come to be fed, and it can be a pest if it isn’t fed on time—as I once discovered on an emu farm when a hundred of them surrounded me with madly shining eyes. An emu has so much meat on its haunches that if a famished man had to choose between a turkey, on the one hand, or an emu, on the other, he wouldn’t have to think twice.

Yet Jared Diamond tells us that Australia had no suitable domesticable animals that might have been raised for meat. If for some reason he imagines that the wild boars of late Ice Age Eurasia, or the fiercely horned bulls of the Minoans, would actually have been easier to domesticate than emus or wallabys… well, what can one say?

No-one will ever know why the Aborigines did not domesticate some of Australia’s native fauna. And it’s even more puzzling why they did not adopt the cultivation of root crops grown by New Guinean people only a few miles away across Torres Straits. Taking into account the foreseeable costs and benefits of farming (and there may have also been a cultural taboos) they were evidently satisfied with hunting and gathering. As in the case of numerous small groups of hunters and gatherers once scattered around the world, and who sometimes lived in loose association with other people who grew crops, farming was the path not taken. More we cannot say. But the idea that Aborigines didn’t keep livestock because Australia had “no domesticable native mammals” cannot be true.

Admittedly, Diamond makes a distinction between ‘tameable’ and ‘domesticable’; but this is a distinction that over long periods of time may be erased. It is only after thousands of years of selective breeding that tameable wild boars or ancient horned cattle became fully domesticated. Without that being attempted no-one can know.

* * *

It gets better. What Diamond actually claims on page 308 is that formerly, during the Ice Ages, Australia had supported a lot of giant marsupials including diprotodonts—some the size of a cow, others big as a rhinoceros:

But all those marsupial candidates for animal husbandry disappeared in the wave of extinctions (or exterminations) that accompanied human colonization of Australia. That left Australia, like New Guinea, with no domesticable native mammals.

So, if we follow the professor’s thinking—and this claim is repeated more than once—he tells us that big and dangerous animals the size of a rhinoceros were “candidates for domestic husbandry”, while wombats and emus were not. How he arrived at his notion of a suitable “candidate” is less than clear. Perhaps we should put him in a pen with a rhinoceros one day, and in another pen with a wombat the next, and ask him where he felt most comfortable. But now that we are in the realm of the absurd let Ogden Nash provide an appropriate coda:

I do not eat the kangaroo
Though many fine Australians do
They hunt them with long boomerangs
And make them into kangaroomeringues.

May 2005