“Abyssinia is, apparently, the native land of donkeys,” Vavilov states flatly. well, maybe.
Two relatively recent studies shed light on the domestication of the donkey. A 2004 paper by Albano Beja-Pereira and his colleagues, published in Science, looked at the molecular evidence. [1] The researchers conclude that the donkey was domesticated twice, once from the Nubian sub-species of wild ass (Equus africanus africanus) and once from the Somali wild ass (E. a. somaliensis). Asian half-ass species (E. hemiones and E. kiang) made no contribution to the modern donkey. The timing of domestication could not be estimated from the DNA, but the authors do say that both events took place in Northeast Africa, which for them comprises Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Vavilov was right on the money.
The other study is a more conventional examination of old bones by Fiona Marshall and the late Stine Rossel and their colleagues, published in PNAS in 2008. [2] The researchers looked in detail at foot bones from 10 ass skeletons dating to about 5000 years ago, and found in a pharaonic complex at Abydos in Middle Egypt. Although the bones were similar in some respects to those from wild asses, in others they seemed to be midway between asses and donkeys. The clincher is that “all of the Abydos skeletons exhibited a range of osteopathologies consistent with load carrying”. In other words, they were being used as beasts of burden, and that damaged their bones — 5000 years ago. That they were buried with the Pharoah suggests these animals were of great significance. As Marshall said:
“This is the first evidence for donkeys carrying loads, which is important because they were the first transport animal … absolutely the first loads off humans’ backs to create land transport routes, the earliest trade routes between Egyptians and Sumerians and so on. … It’s very likely that having land-based transport of this kind actually helped to integrate the state, which was the world’s first and earliest nation-state.”
Notes:
- Beja-Pereira A, England PR, Ferrand N, Jordan S, Bakhiet AO, Abdalla MA, Mashkour M, Jordana J, Taberlet P, & Luikart G (2004). African origins of the domestic donkey. Science (New York, N.Y.), 304 (5678) PMID: 15205528 [↩]
- Rossel, S., Marshall, F., Peters, J., Pilgram, T., Adams, M., & O’Connor, D. (2008). Domestication of the donkey: Timing, processes, and indicators Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (10), 3715-3720 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0709692105 [↩]
