Nowadays, deer is often fed during the winter on fodder racks in order to reduce damage on trees and to help them cope with lower temperatures. I just thought whether a similar type of winter feeding would be a likely scenario for the early domestication of, say, horses etc. For hunters this would’ve had the advantage of a fixed place, where they knew, game would regularly return to, which in turn would’ve reduced the need to follow it over greater distances. Later, hunters could have switched from pure ‘feeding stations’ to keeping and breeding the animals continually in enclosures.
It’s just an idea, which crossed my mind without having read much about it. So what are your thoughts? And how could one possibly find evidence for that?
Dear Stefan,
a scenario not too different from the one that you propose is suggested by David Anthony in his book "The horse, the wheel and the language" (Chapter 10).
"Horses are supremely well adapted to the cold grasslands where they evolved. People who lived in cold grasslands with domesticated cattle and sheep would soon have seen the advantage in keeping horses for meat, just because the horses did not need fodder or water. A shift to colder climatic conditions or even a particularly cold series of winters could have made cattle herders think seriously about domesticating horses."
Enclosures for horses have been found in several early management/domestication sites, such as Dereivka and Botai. Sandra Olsen and Marsha Levine (among others) have long been studying this problem suggesting different interpretations.
See for example:
Article Botai and the Origins of Horse Domestication
Olsen in Zeder et al 2006 "Documenting domestication"
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/323/5919/1332
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