Ran Barkai, Tel Aviv University
When elephants roamed Asia: The significance of Proboscideans in diet, culture and cosmology in Paleolithic Asia (with special reference to the Middle East and China).
Early humans and elephants roamed the Pleistocene landscapes of Asia and shared habitats for hundreds of thousands of years. Many Paleolithic archaeological sites in Asia, and especially in the Middle East and China, contain abundant elephant remains that clearly demonstrate that early human were capable of obtaining these mega herbivores. Paleolithic nutrition was, as we see it now, based on animal meat and fat in addition to plant based food. Evidence for elephant exploitation for dietary purposes is present at many Paleolithic sites over hundreds of thousands of years, revealing bones with cut and percussion marks and different articulations of bones alongside flint artifacts. In several cases elephant body parts were transported to cave sites, most probably in order to be consumed and shared in better settings. The significant role of elephants the Paleolithic is well demonstrated and the dietary significance of proboscideans has been explored recently. I will argue here that during Paleolithic times proboscideans, when available, were a constant and significant source of calories for early humans which were actually dependent on mega-herbivores for their successful survival. Moreover, it appears that the central role of proboscideans as a food source, coupled with the social, behavioral and even physical resemblance between these animals and humans, were the reasons behind the cosmological conception of elephants by early humans. The archaeological evidence for such speculation lies, for example, in the use of elephant bones for making tools that resemble the characteristic Lower Palaeolithic stone handaxes (with a new example from China), as well as the later depictions of mammoths in cave "art" and the production of mammoth "sculptures" and engravings made from mammoth ivory and bone. Ethnographic studies, in this case from India, support such view as well. As early humans in Asia were repeatedly preoccupied by the procurement, exploitation and appreciation of elephants, I will suggest here some cross-cultural and tarns-continental conceptions of human-elephant interactions that might be relevant for other domains of animals and human societies in Asia.
Nicolas Lainé, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Collège de France, Paris.
Another Look at Elephant (non-)Domestication in Asia
In Asia, the domestication of elephants is subject to much debate. Although part of elephants are free-ranging animals, the species has many captives representatives. The latter are however not considered as ‘domesticated’ because of the absence of husbandry. Except for rare cases, the renewal of the population is carried out by collection - via capture - in the forest, or by cross- breeding between village and forest elephants. Non-domestication is generally justified by the abundance of available pachyderms and economic factors.
Based on ethnographic data collected among the Tai-Khamtis in Northeast India, this communication aims to provide a new interpretation on this non-domestication by highlighting the worldview of the considered population. I will specifically seek to reconstruct the logic underlying the scheme of relationship with non- humans within two primordial stages in the constitution of human-elephant interspecies communities: the socialization and capture of wild pachyderms.
I will first describe the process through which a newly captured wild elephant is integrated in the village. This transformation modifies the status of the animal which now is akin to humans; they are then able to cooperate and work together. I will then return to the capture operations carried out riding on the back of elephants. During these operations, these animals serve as intermediate to humans and help them perceive and track the presence of wild congeners. Thus, it is through their elephant-companions that humans manage to take the point of view of their target in order to approach them and easily capture them.
Rivka Rabinovich, The Hebrew University
The Aurochs and the Rhinoceros - Mousterian idols?
Aurochs are commonly found in Middle Paleolithic assemblages, in particular in open air sites. Rhinoceros are also present, although frequencies in archeological assemblages tend to fluctuate. Both species appear in most sites in the southern Levant. Being the largest animals in Middle Paleolithic faunal record (more than one tone in weight), they required specific modes of hunting and exploitation. When uncovered in archeological sites, elements of both species are usually very fragmented, limiting reliable reconstruction of the species size and morphology. Moreover, long bone splinters might be lumped in the same body size category, or ignored altogether, when species identification is impossible.
Thus, we lack complete comprehension of the relation between the Middle Paleolithic hunter-gatherer and the large beasts of his time – the aurochs and the rhinoceros. In the Jordan Valley, where a rich human record reflects the occupation of the area through the Pleistocene, Nahal Mahanayim Outlet (Middle Paleolithic, Upper Pleistocene) site is unique in its bone preservation. Complete elements were uncovered, that required immediate on-site conservation treatment as cracking and splitting occurred immediately upon exposure. Following treatment, the bones remained fragile but complete and available for study. Consequently, for the first time we can actually characterize the size, morphological traits and species differences based on complete bones. On a broader scale, a local baseline of the aurochs can be created for comparison to changes in later period in the context of species selection, over-hunting and even domestication.
NIsha Poyyaprath Rayaroth, Delhi University
Did You See Our Human? State, Benevolence and Indian Circus Animals
Animals have always been an indispensable part of circus around the world until the recent legal proscriptions in many countries and emergence of new concepts such as ‘Noveau Cirque’. Despite the fact that Indian circus is almost a century and a half old, its pasts have hardly been explored. Social scientists have begun posing the question ‘can animals have histories?’ in recent times, recognizing the position of animals as analogous with marginal human groups who are under-represented. That circus animals who are a ‘minority’ in every sense hardly figure even in histories on wildlife, environment and livelihood in India, is not at all surprising. Animals in circus brings to the fore a long tradition of animal trade, taming, training, and human accompaniment, raising significant questions regarding their acquisition, captive life, breeding and changing relation to forests and wilderness over the periods. They are inextricably linked with a colonial genealogy of the ‘exotic’ and ‘exhibit’. This paper explores various discourses around animals, both wild and captive, in relation to the bans of wild animals in circus in India and the legal battles that ensued. This would unravel how the very idea of scientific conservation becomes a violent guile of State and civil society while actively propagating the binary of cruelty and mercy in the case of circus animals.
Steven A. Rosen, Ben-Gurion University
A Chronology of Animal Exploitation in the Negev: Hunting to Herding to Trading to Warfare
Examination of the patterns of animal exploitation in the ancient Negev indicates a sequence of cumulative functions of animals as they are adopted into desert societies. As different animals were adopted into desert societies, the potentials for exploitation evolved with ever increasing impact on desert social organization, economy, and external relations. Notably, no animals were domesticated in the desert, and thus even the adoption of animals into desert society reflects the dynamics of interaction with the settled zone. The sequence of primary animal exploitation is cumulative, beginning with gazelle/ibex (Epipaleolithic/Early Neolithic) and continuing to goat/sheep (ca. 7 th millennium BCE), donkey (ca. 4 th millennium BCE), and camel (late first millennium BCE). These adoptions in turn, of course, reflect economic changes from hunting-gathering to subsistence herding to trade and ultimately to raiding and warfare. The new adoptions/economic systems did not replace the old, but rather supplemented them, with major implications for all aspects of desert societies.
Li Zhipeng, Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
The Domesticated Ritual of Dogs in Ancient China
Ron Shimelmitz,University of Haifa and David Yellin Academic College of Education, and Nimrod Marom, University of Haifa
Hunting for Prestige: from the Neolithic to the Iron Age
We employ archaeological animal bone assemblages to observe diachronic change in the hunting of large carnivores (lions, leopards and bears) in the late Pleistocene/Holocene Levant. It appears that large carnivores were hunted within the Holocene, in sharp contrast to their near absence from the late Pleistocene assemblages. This pattern may reflect a phase transition in human-animal interactions at that time. We examine some of the possible dimensions of this phase transition with special focus on the mid-Holocene shift from leopard to lion and bear hunting as a case study.
During the Neolithic leopards were imbued with symbolic meaning, exemplified by the iconography of Çatalhöyük. In Western Asian Bronze and Iron Ages, leopard hunting declined, and the congeneric lion became the large felid prey of choice. We argue that the change towards lion hunting was affected by the ethos and technology of Axial Age chariot-riding elites. By contrasting the leopard/lion contexts of hunting, we hope to illuminate key differences in the entanglement of these numinous carnivores in human- wrought webs of social meaning.
James Hevia, University of Chicago
The "Punjab Military Transport Animal Act" (1903) and the Animal Management Regime of the British Indian Army
This paper provides an overview of my forthcoming book concerning “beasts of burden” in imperial military actions. Specifically, the study examines the use of animals such as camels, mules and donkeys to transport war materials in campaigns of conquest or pacification undertaken by the British Indian Army. The temporal arc of the study begins with the Second Afghan War (1878-1880), during which some 50,000 camels perished, and ends in the early twentieth century. By 1910 an animal management regime had been established within a wholly new Supply and Transport Corps in the Indian Army. In this regime, transport animals were figured in logistical equations in terms of their carrying capacity and in actuarial terms, where their working life-spans were carefully monitored and recorded, and replacement requirements calculated. In order to deal with this movement from mass death and logistical disorder to an animal bio-power regime, I will situate an extensive, if scattered, British imperial archive on laboring animals within the framework of recent scholarly investigations into human-animal relations.
Noa Grass, Tel-Aviv University
A Million Horses; Economic Aspects of the Horse Administration in Early Ming China
Horses presented a military necessity and an economic problem to the Ming. As in previous dynasties, the Ming traded with foreigners for superior horses and bred them locally. While there is common agreement about the dynasty’s reliance on the purchase of horses in the latter part of the dynasty, there is evidence that in the early Ming the local rearing of foreign horses was more important. If the numbers presented to the throne in the first half of the fifteenth century are true, the registered horse population surpassed one million.
This paper discusses the plausibility of these reports by assessing the amount of land, fodder, and manpower needed to maintain such a large number of horses against available government land, grain tax income and labor service. Second, it offers an explanation for the decline of the horse-rearing administration in the second half of the fifteenth century.
Aaron Skabelund,Brigham Young University
Zoological Gardens and the Contradictions of Empire in Colonial Seoul and Taipei
Historians describe nineteenth and early twentieth-century zoos as imperial institutions that promoted an orderly vision of exotic colonized landscapes. In metropolitan capitals like London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, paved pathways and labeled iron cages concealed the violence of the colonial enterprise and emphasized man’s control of nature. Zoos provided the basis of what historian Ian Miller, writing about Tokyo's Ueno Zoo, has called the “dreamlife of imperialism.” But zoos were also built in the empire as well as in the metropole, which has attracted far less scholarly attention.
By focusing on Japanese-built zoos in Seoul (1908) and Taipei (1914), this paper argues that colonial zoos explicitly exposed the contradictions behind imperialism’s “dreamlife.” To Japanese administrators, these zoos, like those in the metropole, had both a recreational and pedagogical mission. They enjoyed immense popularity, as thousands of colonized Taiwanese, Koreans, and Japanese settlers alike visited zoos in large numbers. As touted in textbooks, zoo guides, and other literature, they symbolized the preeminence of Western scientific knowledge in the rational management of animals, and by association, the colony itself. But zoos could also be harnessed by the colonized to critique the imperial enterprise. Nationalist intellectuals criticized zoo’s excesses and identified the bondage of caged animals with their own experience as colonized subjects. The complicated legacies of the period continue to the present, as contemporary zoos in Taipei and Seoul choose to variously commemorate or efface their colonial origins.
Meir Shahar (Tel Aviv University)
The Chinese Cult of The Horse King
Nowadays largely forgotten, the Horse King (Mawang) also known as the Horse God (Mashen) was among the most popular deities of late-imperial north China. His flourishing cult mirrored the ubiquity of his protégés – horses, donkeys, and mules – in Chinese quotidian lives. Equines were relied upon for agriculture, transportation, and industrial production, hence the widespread veneration or their tutelary deity.
This essay examines the ecological background of the Horse King's late-imperial cult. It surveys the diverse social and professional groups that, dependent upon equines for a living, worshiped the draft-animals' guardian deity: Peasants, merchants, cavalrymen, muleteers, donkey-drivers, coachmen, and veterinarians. Particular attention is given to the lavish state patronage of the cult. Horses were relied upon in numerous government organs, ranging from the military and the courier system to the imperial palace. Therefore, the Horse King was dedicated official shrines in government offices and military bases alike.
The ecological analysis of the cult is joined by considerations of the attitude it might evince towards animals: Did equine-owners venerate the god because of their dependence on his beneficiaries, or might they have been genuinely fond of their hard-working beasts? Was the cult motivated by economic considerations only, or did feelings for animals figure in it? Particularly intriguing in this regard are temples in which the Horse King was worshiped side-by- side with other gods such as the Medicine King (Yaowang). The joint cult of animal and human tutelary deities might indicate that they share a similar theological standing. Draft-animals and their human masters are equally vulnerable and equally in need of divine protection.
Huaiyu Chen (Arizona State University) and Zhang Xing (Peking University)
From Lion to Tiger: The Buddhist Changing Images of Apex Predators in Trans-Asian Contexts
This paper aims to provide an interpretation on the connections among the worlds of nature, society, and religion in trans-Asian contexts, with the focus on apex predators. In some Asian religious writings, animals, as living beings in nature, and human beings in society, and spiritual beings in religion lived in similar hierarchical orders. Environment and ecosystems shaped the order of animals. Social ideas, institutions, and practices created social order. Human learned knowledge, living experience, and inspired imaginaire formed and shaped religious order. These orders interacted with each other. In particular, the apex predators played vital roles in shaping both social and spiritual life in trans-Asian contexts. With the spread of Buddhism from South Asia to East Asia, it seems that the prominent position of the lion in South Asia was challenged and supplemented by the tiger, the apex predator in East Asia. The latter, with its cultural and symbolic central roles in East Asian political, economic, and cultural life, had a tremendous impact on Buddhist culture in East Asia, as Chinese Buddhist narratives, arts, rituals indicate. For instance, the ability of taming tigers became a benchmark for becoming a medieval Chinese Buddhist saint.
Bernard Charlier (Catholic University of Louvain-la- Neuve)
Giving One’s Sheep to the Wolves and Becoming ‘Meritorious’ among Nomadic Mongolian Herders.
In this paper I analyze one of the ways in which some Mongolian herders ideally relate to their environment. The ethnography describes the rules governing the relationship between the herders and their natural environment. These rules refer to a natural environment which must, in an ideal situation, remain in a state of balance. I investigate how this ideology is present in the way in which the herders conceptualize an attack of wolves as a gift to Cagaan Aav, the supernatural master of the land (gazaryn ezen). I contend that the gift should not be considered as an economic exchange, but as a mark of respect which allows the herder to be favoured with good fortune. The attack of wolves is linked to the Buddhist notion of ‘merit’ (buyan) and reveals one dimension of the victim that is his/her meritorious character. Merit and fortune involve knowledge of moral standards, power and ethics, and their constitutive relationships are analysed in relation to perception of the wolf. I use the idea of merit to understand how herders perceive the ethical and reflexive relationships to themselves and to Cagaan Aav.
Nimrod Baranovich (University of Haifa)
Artistic Representations of Animals, and their Role in the Construction of Contemporary Mongolian and Tibetan Identity in China
The Mongols and the Tibetans are two of the largest ethnic minorities in China today. Throughout history both peoples have inhabited huge and sparsely populated regions with harsh climatic conditions, and both are known for their long tradition of nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism which they developed as an adaptation to their natural environment. Because of the characteristics of the regions that they have inhabited and the dominant place of pastoralist lifestyle in their traditional culture, domestic animals such as horses, sheep, cattle, yaks and camels, as well as wild animals like wolfs, wild yaks and various kinds of deer have played important role in their cultures and everyday life. However, in recent decades, as a result of rapid modernization, severe environmental degradation and various socio-economic and political factors, the Tibetans and Mongols in China have experienced dramatic changes in their lifestyle and culture, and also in their relationship with the animals surrounding them. In this paper I will discuss several artistic representations of animals and the relationship between humans and animals by contemporary Mongolian and Tibetan artists. My goal is to examine how these representations are used to construct and assert ethnic identities, and convey messages and sentiments that relate to these identities and the dramatic transformations that these minorities have experienced in recent decades.
Anatoly Khazanov (University of Wisconsin)
Contemporary Pastoralism in Central Asia
For millennia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan remain one of the main regions of extensive mobile pastoralism in Eurasia. Its decay had begun in the Soviet period, when pastoralists were forced to become laborers on the state-owned or the so-called collective farms and were divorced from the property on pastures and most of livestock. Only since the 1960s, the Soviets made some efforts to modernize the pastoralism in the region. But this was achieved by large state subsidies, disregard for the production cost, and complete neglecting of environmental factor. The next period of drastic changes in the Central Asian pastoralism can be characterized as a period of its de-modernization. Despite many differences in individual Central Asian countries, the development of pastoralism in the post-Soviet period has many common characteristics. In the 1990s, when the Central Asian states experienced a severe economic and financial crisis, all support of their pastoralist sector practically ceased to exist. This resulted in a drastic decline in stock numbers. Still, the stock has again become the private property, and this resulted in its resumed growth, in the 2000s. In the countries most advanced on the transition to the market economy, such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, one is witnessing now an emergence of a small number of prosperous, market oriented pastoralists. They already can be characterized as capitalist or semi-capitalist farmers. From a pure economic point of view these pastoralist farms seem to be the most perspective. However, in all Central Asian countries, the majority of pastoralists have become subsistence-oriented sedentary peasants, who own only a few animals. And everywhere the pastoralism has become less mobile. While pastures near settlements are exhausted, distance pastures remain underutilized, or even are completely abandoned. In principle, the mobile pastoralism in Central Asian environments still retains advantage over many other types of agriculture. It remains a rational and sustainable system for utilizing natural resources in the arid and semi-arid zones. Otherwise, the vast territories unsuitable for cultivation would cease to be used for food-production and would be left as a waste land. However, a survival of mobile pastoralism in Central Asia depends on its new modernization and commercialization along the lines of market oriented economy.
Etan Ayalon (Eretz Israel Museum)
Traditional Arab Beehives in the Land of Israel
A large and unique apiary was recently discovered at Tel Reḥov in the Beth-She‘an Valley, dated to the tenth–ninth centuries BCE. It apparently originally contained some 180 cylindrical hives made of unfired clay, of a type known from ancient Egyptian illustrations. Because ancient beehives were made of perishable materials very few have survived, and ancient written sources and illustrations are inadequate in depicting them. However, the picture can be partly filled out by ethnography, the study of traditional cultures. For example, among the Arabs, apiaries can still be documented including their use, output, care of the bees and other aspects. A methodical survey of ancient or traditional apiaries in the Land of Israel has apparently not yet been implemented. This lecture presents a preliminary picture of the subject.
Various types of recent beehives have been documented in Israel in specific geographical distributions. Cylindrical clay beehives such as those from Tel Reḥov were common in Galilee, Samaria and Judea. In western Samaria and on the coastal plain (mainly between the Yarkon River and the Soreq Stream) beehives were made of pottery jars. In some cases these vessels were ordinary jars in secondary use, broken at the base to create an opening through which smoke was blown to drive out the bees before collecting the honey. In other cases the jars were manufactured intentionally as hives with a large perforation in the base. The latter are known fromarchaeological findings at least from the Hellenistic period and thereafter. Cylindricalhives, similar to the clay hives but fired, were manufactured on the southern coastal plain (the Gaza region) but apparently also in the Galilee, Samaria and Judea. In the Golan Heights and the northern Jordan Valley hives woven from split reeds coated with clay mixed with straw were common. The Eretz Israel Museum’s collection contains a rare vertical beehive made of unfired clay with openings only at the top, found at Birya in the Upper Galilee in 1944. It was apparently intended to be used once and was broken to extract the honey. There is evidence in this country that beehives were also made out of hollow logs and spaces in walls.
The reasons for the regional differences in types of beehives are as yet unclear. This little-known subject requires a detailed survey before all knowledge and information about it disappears forever.
Nadin Heé (Freie Universität Berlin and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Tuna as Economic Resource and Symbolic Capital in the Japanese Empire
This contribution explores the role of migratory fish – tuna – and its materiality within the Japanese Empire. In historiography on Japanese imperialism there is what could be called a terrestrial bias. Historians generally analyze Japan’s Empire and its expansion in terms of the occupation of landmasses and islands and the fight for natural sources, but the waste oceans and its living resources being part of the empire were scarcely mentioned. Yet, it is this maritime empire and its living resources such as tuna, this paper argues, that were the backbone of the Japanese Empire. The very materiality of migrating tuna, its ways through the oceans steered human interaction with the fish. I will trace how it was used as a commodity, but also how it formed narratives of the Japanese as “ocean people”, being attributed a specific relationship with tuna. The paper seeks to show that it was tuna both in form of economic resources and symbolic capital, what constituted the Japanese empire and its society, but also its global impact and power to an amazing extent.
Sijia Cheng (Heidelberg University)
“A Second Noah’s Ark”: Global Animal Trade and the Birth of Peking Zoo
Histories of zoos have attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years. However, little attention has been given to the Peking Zoo, the first modern zoo in China, opened in 1907. In order to equip the Zoo with an extensive collection, the Qing court purchased exotic animals from Germany, America, Southeast Asia and Africa. Most animals were acquired from a well- known German animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913). Many newspapers reported about this trade and described such a large transportation of beasts as “a second Noah’s ark”. This article analyzes how collecting exotic animals for the Peking Zoo served as a demonstration of imperial power in late Qing China. Firstly, it probes into changing attitudes toward Western zoos in Qing China and examines how zoos were gradually recognized as significant institutions. Then it illustrates how exotic animals were exchanged as global commodities through animal dealers since the 1860s. Finally, it investigates how China eventually engaged in this global market for gaining cultural capital on the global stage. Instead of considering the birth of Peking Zoo as a local enterprise, this article situates it within a global economic history of animal trade.
Rotem Kowner (University of Haifa)
The Premodern Break-off with Animal Meat Consumption and Its Modern Renewal: The Chinese and Japanese “Models”
In both China and Japan, the consumption of animal meat became increasingly a taboo during the latter half the first millennium. In the same vein, both countries have witnessed a spectacular rise in the consumption of meat in modern times. While the similarities are striking and can be associated largely with ecological grounds, so are the differences. Whereas in China the taboo had limited impact and was not comprehensive, in Japan it was strictly obeyed by the majority of the population for more than thousand years. However, Japan also broke the taboo earlier than China and put in considerable efforts to provide animal meat to its population. In this presentation, I shall explore the reasons for the differences between these two representative national diets of East Asia: the continental and the island models. In doing so, I will seek to explain the different ecological and national mechanisms that account for the taboos on consumption of animal meat and its break-off in modern times.
Thomas David DuBois (ANU College of Asia and the Pacific)
Tastes and practices in China’s Milk Industry since 1945
This paper examines the production and consumption of milk in China, with specific reference to the vast expansion of the dairy industry in Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia. It tells two stories: the first was a productive transformation from the household dairy farms that served foreign communities of Beijing and Shanghai, to an early period of industrial production after 1949, and the period of stellar growth that began in the 1990s and continues to accelerate today. The second is one of markets and tastes. The drive to milk production under the PRC was initially for foreign markets, for industrial proteins and for calf rearing, rather than human consumption in China. Advances in shipping and packaging brought dairy products directly to the Chinese consumer, as fresh milk, yoghurt, milk candy and milk powder. These two stories anchor a number of interconnected phenomena: new rearing, feeding and milking practices, the transition from household production to large scale facilities such as the massive Nestle complex near Harbin, and of course the food safety scandals that threatened Wen Jiabao’s dream—one that for many reasons was unimaginable just twenty years ago—of every child in China drinking half a liter of milk each day.
Alisha Gao (Goethe University)
Factory Farming in China: Pursuit of Modernization
The Western farming model of intensive livestock production has become the fasting growing sector in Chinese agriculture since its adoption in the 1980s. The Chinese government has been actively promoting the methods and practices of factory farming to enhance the efficient and productive procurement of meat and dairy products. Various studies have shown a significant increase in meat and dairy consumption, signifying the rising affluence and a growing middle class in China. The Chinese government has welcomed and encouraged this consumption pattern, as signaling their success in economic improvement and national “modernity”. This paper will explore the history of factory farms in China, the cultural transformation of meat and dairy consumption and the consequences of such “modern” practices of factory farming. This exploration will be key in understanding how the government has sponsored factory farms in their pursuit of efficiency, productivity and economic success and the competing understanding of “modernity” throughout China and the world today.
Zhao Xin (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Horses in Ancient China
This research aims to use an ancient DNA approach to genetically characterize ancient domesticated horses from archaeological sites in China in order to trace the origin and spread of horse in ancient China. Using a modified silica-spin column method, DNA was successfully extracted from ancient horse bone or tooth samples in dedicated ancient DNA labs following vigorous protocols for contamination prevention. This study attempted to amplify both mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and nuclear single nucleotide polymorphic (SNP) markers for coat color using standard PCR techniques. The mtDNA data had a high success rate (80%), revealing 42 haplotypes belonging to 6 haplogroups (A-F); however, difficulty was encountered for SNP amplifications. The limited successful coat color gene amplifications revealed some coat colors (chestnut, bay and palomino).
When combined with others’ research data, it is clear that those earliest horse remains already have significantly high mtDNA diversity, indicating it is unlikely they were domesticated locally from a single ancestral population.
The coat colors also provide a unique opportunity to understand the complex connection between people and horses in the past. One extremely rare coat color of palomino was detected in a burial in this study. This is the first time the color is found in ancient horses. Most intriguing is that the horse skeleton with the palomino coat was buried with a human skeleton, while two other horse skeletons with a common chestnut coat color were buried in animal sacrificial pits.
This study demonstrates the unique contribution that ancient DNA analysis can make, when combined with archaeology, to our understanding of the origin and history of animals and to the reconstruction of human-animal interactions in the past.
Gila Kahila Bar-Gal (The Hebrew University)
The endangered Przewalski’s horse: is it truly the last wild horse?
Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus), known as the last remaining true wild horses, were discovered in the Asian steppes in the 1870s and became extinct in the wild in the 1960s. Captive breeding core, based on 13 horses (eight females and five males), representing only four maternal lineages, have survived and established the present-day population. The current Przewalski’s horse (PH) population is still endangered, counting 2,109 individuals, of which 578 were reintroduced in Chinese and Mongolian reserves. Genomic study of contemporary (21 genomes and 34 individuals) and museum samples (12 specimens) including the Holotype was conducted to determine its taxonomic statues for conservation purposes. We found that the PH populations split ~45,000 years ago from the domesticated horse but thereafter remained connected by gene- flow as both shared the same geographical region. In addition, reduced heterozygosity, increased inbreeding, and variable introgression of domestic alleles, ranging from non-detectable levels to as much as 31.1% was found among the breeding core individuals who live ~110 years in captivity. Our findings establish a framework for evaluating the persistence of genetic variation in future reintroduced populations.
Ma Jianxiong (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Animal Agency in the Caravan Transportation: Mules and Muleteers in the Frontier Society between Northwest Yunnan, Southeast Tibet and North Burma
Mule caravans created the transportation that integrated the mountainous zone of subtropical Southwest China, tropical Southeast Asia and Tibet in history. This transportation system provided a multi-layer social and physical mechanism for political, social and economic exchanges and mobility, as well as local animal husbandry and agriculture. A horse-mule will have a good strong capacity and is patient, and is capable of heavy work over a long distance. The native muleteers have developed a very rich knowledge about how to raise caravan animals as well as the rich local knowledge about the geography between Yunnan and Burma. The muleteer tradition seriously considers about: 1. The age of a carrier mule; 2. The muleteer moral about how to treat their animal in journey; 3. A skillful muleteer should be skillful in raising mules and maintaining tools during his travels; So that, the muleteers should be veterinarians, and know some basic skills for healing animals and people, which could help them to deal with most ordinary diseases on the road. In this research, the author points out that, the history of long-distance transportation between China and Southwest Asia is mainly linked with the mule agency, especially based on local knowledge and experiences about the human-animal relationship, which have maintained the commercial circles between the Yangtse River and the Irrawaddy River into a big network. In general, a specific emotional relationship between mules and muleteers performs important role in the caravan transportation, which works to be the significant animal agency in the history of transportation in this part of the world.
Liora Kolska Horwitz (The Hebrew University) and Ianir Milevski (Israeli Antiquities Authority)
The Domestication of the Donkey in the Southern Levant: Zoology, Iconography and Economy
This paper discusses the timing of the first domestic donkeys (Equus asinus) in the southern Levant (Israel/-Palestine- /Jordan) with reference to the archaeozoological record for the region. It further examines their utilization in local exchange systems based on iconographical records (miniature, artistic-cultic representations) found in archaeological sites. Specifically, the paper reviews data concerning the role of these beasts of burden and the possible existence of a specialized social stratum or group of persons related to their use in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3600-2300 BC). These data are bolstered by additional ancient Near Eastern sources and ethnographical examples from the New World thought to possibly represent analogous situations.