Panel Discussion: Alternate Domestications Part 2
- cepmurphywrites
- Jul 22
- 19 min read
By
D.G. Valdron
Dale Cozort
Jared Kavanagh
Jeff Provine
Edited by Gary Oswald.
This is a panel discussion, modelled on live in-person panels at science fiction conventions, to discuss a particular theme. That theme is Domestication of animals and plants in Alternate History and the questions asked were "What if plants and animals not domesticated in real life were domesticated and what if those that were, weren’t? What effect would that have on history if societies which never had many domesticated crops or farm animals instead had access to that labour and food sources or those who did, didn’t? Which animal which was never domesticated was most likely to be so and which would have the biggest effect on history if it has been? And how do you make exploring those changes interesting in fiction?"
The five people taking part are: Gary Oswald, who also acted as moderator, D.G. Valdron, Dale Cozort, Jared Kavanagh and Jeff Provine.
Part 1 of this panel is here and should be read first.
OSWALD: So in part one we talked a lot about how domestication has worked in reality, and how that could differ in other circumstances. Which leads us perhaps to the question of how this can/should be explored in fiction, which you all write. How do you make the profound changes provided by alternate domestications interesting and not dry when in fiction?
VALDRON: LOL. That implies I’ve succeeded in making it interesting and not dry. Let me take a stab at it.
How do we make this shit interesting? Yes. Good question. When I did Bear Cavalry, I did it as a thought experiment, trying to work out a pathway to get from point A - Wild bears to point Z - Big ass armoured bears. That ended up feeling plausible but incredibly dry.
So I funked it up. I developed or borrowed a character who would find this all cool and interesting, and convey enthusiasm, used all sorts of devices, and framed it visually as a documentary film. That doesn’t necessarily work - it’s a one-time only shot. But my back was up against the wall.
In terms of making it interesting, I think that the trick is to give it context. Talk about how it affects people’s lives. And let’s be clear, it always affects lives.
Back when I was young, we had chickens. It was my job to feed them, make sure the water was clean, and collect the eggs. Along the way, I’d replace straw and shovel out the coop. Well, it certainly affected my life - it was a chore, meaningful chore. It consumed a small but measurable part of my day, every day. And I ate a lot of eggs growing up.
So you have a domesticate - you have to wrangle the thing, large or small, you commit time and energy to managing it, whether that’s building barns or coops, or having some kid shepherd them all over the place, or whatever. It becomes part of the lifestyle or the context of life. Sometimes it’s the entire lifestyle - imagine cowboys without cows, or Mongols without horses.
And it can make for really profound changes to the context of life - beasts of burden can massively shift a lot of weight over significant distances. Humans can do that too. But having beasts of burden changes what’s done and how we do it - faster, easier, but with its own difficulties.
More meat in a society, more robust inhabitants, more violent and warlike (because they can get away with it). A particular domesticate can reshape things.
This isn’t even talking about things like zoonotic diseases which can mangle things.
I think that following consequences into people’s lives is what gives you the opportunity to make it interesting rather than dry (that and employing all kinds of literary techniques).
As a thought experiment, let’s try Qviat (sic). Qviat is musk-ox wool. It’s a lot finer than sheep wool, and so highly valued. It’s also fairly rare, there’s not a lot of musk-ox, and they’re not really domesticated, and they inhabit fairly shitty horrible parts of the world which don’t have a lot of humans. So typically, Qviat is seasonally shed by musk-ox, and it’s collected as it sheds, which makes for relatively small supplies.
But hold on, Qviat was a unique and fairly valuable wool. The Inuit were at the peripheries of the fur trading networks. So it’s just hypothetically possible that with the right people in the right places, Qviat could have been introduced to the trading network and a demand arose.
As a trade good, it’s light, portable and easily stored. It could get into a trading network, and the Inuit might have parlayed that into more and better access to western goods, metal tools, even firearms and gunpowder. So there’s enough value there to motivate people.
So the Inuit, or some groups among the Inuit start making a point of collecting Qviat for trade, storing it for retrieval and living their lives. This can evolve to systematically following the musk-ox around during Qviat season. Hell, maybe it’s the job you give to the kids while the grown ups are doing their things, or an assignment to a sub-group while the rest are off elsewhere.
The musk-ox habituate to human presence. A commensalism develops, and some of the Inuit find that some of these musk-ox are groomable. You can collect a lot more Qviat grooming them than waiting to pick strands off of bushes and rocks. Slowly, you get a domesticate. But the Inuit are nomadic seasonal travellers. Sticking around the musk-ox gives big Qviat harvests, and opportunities for trading wealth. So you start to see a bifurcation - traditional Inuit living traditional lifestyles, and the ones who are year-round musk-ox herders and harvesters. There’s competition and conflict between the two groups. Trade between them, as the herders are relatively wealthier. Perhaps raiding of stockpiles, because Europeans don’t care who sells it to them.
Society is reshaped, or new societies are shaped, possibly in interesting ways, with new opportunities, new conflicts, different tensions in how people live their lives.
You can do this in different ways. Suppose Elephants or Stegodonts had made it to New Guinea? Well, they’re basically organic bulldozers. Would having them around reshape New Guinea societies? What if they were the one potential domesticate available in New Guinea for much of the formative period, and so societies shaped around the obstacle of a vital domesticate whose life span matched humans.
Again, in terms of making it interesting, you show or explore the pervasive shaping of people’s lives and conflicts. As to how…. Well, you can do media res - assume it’s all there, and let people figure it out as you draw the world around them. Or you can show the process through snapshots or excerpts or something. That can be tougher.
For me, I think the more interesting thing is seeing the ripples go out from tossing the stone into the water. Introduce a new domesticate, or potential domesticate, and see how it happens, how the changes make their way. I think a society in transformation is fundamentally interesting.
OSWALD: To jump into the conversation myself, I think as someone who really likes reading about alternate domestication scenarios (I love Bear Cavalry, I love Lands of Red and Gold, I love Bearfish by John O’Brien) but haven’t written one myself, it feels like doing AH on hard mode. Normal AH often has real history as a guide rail. If you are writing about Ted Cruz winning the 2016 election, you have what really happened between 2016 and 2025 as your plot. You just need to decide how Ted winning changes those events. Same with Harald Hardrada becoming King of England in 1066, you have a framework of real history to work from.
Whereas with domestications, they happened so long ago, we don’t have the events afterwards. It becomes more like fantasy world building without that crutch of history to rely on. In both Bear Cavalry and Lands of Red and Gold, this is avoided to some extent by having the societies affected by the changes isolated, so you can bring them into modern history but still it’s building a society from scratch in a way you don’t need to so much with smaller changes.
I think those larger changes make it both incredibly rewarding to read about, the goal of a lot of AH is to try and create something genuinely different after all, but also very intimidating to write.
PROVINE: Great points above about involving character to make the domestication interesting. All good stories are about an engaging character with a goal and the struggle to achieve that goal. The domestication itself may be that goal (such as a story of a caveman befriending a wolf, which then becomes the first dog), or the domestication may be part of the world-building, in which we might explore it a bit in the background. Going into too much explanation would slow the story down to a grind, making it dry as you were warning. Those “as you know…” monologues about how the tech works might work better in an appendix than in the story itself.
For a real-world example with adoption, though not quite domestication, I’m reminded of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier’s work bringing potatoes into the French diet. Potatoes had been introduced long before Parmentier’s birth in 1737, but folks didn’t want to eat them. They felt it was a dirty root more suited as pig feed than human cuisine, and somehow it even got a bad rap connection to leprosy that led to outlawing its cultivation in 1748. Parmentier was captured and imprisoned in Prussia during the Seven Years’ War, where he was made to eat potatoes. Frederick the Great had recognized them as a valuable food supply and drove the adoption of potatoes in Prussia by ordering the peasantry to cultivate them and imposed stiff punishments for anyone who didn’t.
It must have been some impressive prison food, because it convinced Parmentier that potatoes were great. For years later, he campaigned for them, finally overturning the law forbidding them in 1772 and even receiving a royal award for proving they were a viable option in ongoing failed harvests. Still, people overall were not convinced, and he was even fired for trying to establish a potato patch in the Invalides. He worked to change their minds, in methods a bit more eloquent than Frederick. Parmentier published recipes, threw lavish dinners with potato dishes for guests like Antoine Levoisier and Benjamin Franklin, and he hired guards for his potato patch as if they were valuable and might be stolen. People suddenly began to think they might actually be valuable and then did, in fact, try to steal them. Parmentier made sure they did by telling his “guards” to take nights off and take any bribe people offered them to get a potato. Within a few years, potatoes were on plates all over France, and they probably saved quite a few lives during long decades of war and famine.
So there’s a story! It’s all about a guy who had a dream of getting people to eat potatoes, and his antics make it work. The trick is to apply such a situation to other domestications that didn’t or haven’t happened.
Looking out over my lawn today, I’m seeing hundreds of dandelions, those bitterly hated weeds that drive my neighbours to spend small fortunes to destroy by dumping all kinds of poisons. Should they, though? According to Healthline and other sources, dandelions are packed with fibre, vitamins (especially A and K), and antioxidants, not to mention potentially managing cholesterol, blood sugar, and liver disease. Perhaps we need a Parmentier to introduce a dandelion green salad. Or, if we had seen it cultivated as more than a medicinal crop in Eurasia, we might see selective breeding like the wild mustard plant (giving us kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and more!). This timeline could see people munching on hefty dandelion stalks instead of celery or enlarged seeds like we see with sunflower seeds. With its rapid growth and maturation, it could be a multiple harvest crop, and the oil from those large seeds or flours as a driver of biofuel.
COZORT: I’ve usually seen alternate domestication as a means to an end in AH, not the main event. Societies grow more complex because of the extra resources domesticated animals give them. That can make them more interesting subjects for stories, though hunter-gatherers, I suppose, might have their own sources of interest. That being said, what kinds of domestication would make an interesting AH story?
In one of my novels, I have something that blurs the line between domestication and slavery. In “All Timelines Lead to Rome,” a type of small archaic human a lot like the Flores Hobbits gets to Sardinia and survives there until the first Neolithic settlers arrive on the island. Instead of killing them off, the newly arrived Neolithic settlers decide that they can be useful and either enslave or domesticate them, depending on your views of how human they were. They were on the line that also led to modern humans, but with brains about the size of a chimpanzee’s could they be considered human in the same sense we are? In any case, they can’t interbreed with humans (in this story) and are treated as particularly bright domestic animals, remaining isolated on Sardinia until Carthage/Roman times, when the Romans spread them far and wide around their growing empire, breeding them for a wide variety of uses–which is possible partly because domestication reduces the length of their generations, something that happened with dogs versus wolves, but is still one of the weaknesses of the scenario.
By the way, Sardinia is actually a reasonable place for archaic humans to have gotten to. It was isolated from mainland Italy even in the depths of the ice age, but close enough that it shouldn’t have been that hard to get to. There are hints that some kind of humans got there a very long time ago, with unique primitive tools found and hints in the fossils of the place’s unique animals that they may have been preyed upon by some as yet unfound predator–basically the larger animals retained the ability to run fast, which is unusual among island animals with no large predators. No archaic human skeletons have been found yet, but I suspect that at some point we’ll find some unique human remains on Sardinia or one of the other Mediterranean islands. Primitive humans as essentially domesticated animals seems morally uniquely yucky, and in some ways I suppose we’re lucky that none of the species survived long enough for that to happen to them. Blurring the line between humans and animals is bad enough with the great apes, much less bringing in beings even closer than us but who genuinely couldn’t function on their own in human society.
Shifting gears a little, as someone early said, some animals are begging to be domesticated. The same thing is true of plants. My parents were avid gardeners in the US Midwest and a little weed often grew in their gardens. They always cultivated around them, though they never planted them. They called them ground cherries because while they are distantly related to tomatoes, they have a small yellow fruit about the size of a cherry tomato, but sort of sweet and a little tangy. We routinely ate them but never planted them. They grew up easily in disturbed soil. Apparently Indians tolerated them in their fields too but never cultivated them. There is now a cultivated version, with much bigger and sweeter fruit, with the seeds available on Amazon. Ground cherry domestication by Indians is certainly a viable what-if, though I can’t imagine making much of a story out of that. If anyone wants to see that as a challenge, I would be interested in seeing the result.
KAVANAGH: To pick up on the topic of how to make alternate domestication scenarios interesting, that of course depends on what kind of tale you’re trying to tell. Taking Lands of Red and Gold as an example, that started life as an online timeline where in a sense the changed world is the story. For the purposes of writing the timeline, I just used a variety of methods to give glimpses into the changed world, from direct description to vignettes to ‘alternate documents” and so forth.
When the time came to convert that into a straight book, I essentially had three choices. I could just leave the alternate domestication story in the background and get on with a narrative set in the world. I could present the alternate domestication story first - in other words, here’s my worldbuilding, I hope you like it - and then get on with the narrative. Or I could have alternated bits of the “modern narrative” with the history of the worldbuilding, by successive chapters or some such method, and show things that way.
There was a case for each way of doing it. I could have started in medias res, and let people try to figure it out, even though they couldn’t know it all. I could start with the worldbuilding (after a couple of narrative chapters) and lose readers who thought the worldbuilding was all there was of the book. Or I could alternate chapters and lose readers who were jarred by the switching in pace and setting. I opted for number two, and I know I lost some readers over it - I’ve seen it in reviews, for example - but these are the kinds of choices you need to make when presenting such a scenario.
If I was creating another alternate domestication scenario today, I’d probably focus more on developing tales set in the world, and leave the rest as background. I think that’s easier to write and easier to make interesting, at least for a wider group of readers. But I retain a fond place in my heart for those kind of in-depth alternate history scenarios, and so I like to read them even if I’m not convinced the potential readership is that large.
VALDRON: I feel we’ve barely scratched the surface of this subject. Why do some things get domesticated, why do others don’t. Opportunities, opportunity costs, cultural fits, mutualism, there’s a huge raft of fascinating topics.
One observation I’ll make, about animals and plant domestications, before going onto plants, is that social economics plays a big part.
Basically, it’s a lot easier and cheaper, more cost/effective as a society, to acquire a viable domesticate than to actually go through the trouble of domesticating something. Basically, it’s easier to buy off the shelf than to build it yourself. So I think domestications tend to spread to the far limits of their potential range, and when they do that, they tend to shut the door on other potential domestications. Useful plants and critters - be they chicken, horses, cattle, sheep and pigs, tended to spread.
The other factor in terms of economics, cost/benefit, is that when you have two effective domestications in the same niche, the more efficient one tends to displace. Horses and cattle are dominant the world over. Their potential rivals - water buffalo, yak, llama, camel even elephant were basically confined to niches where the primaries couldn’t make it. Hypothetically, if some culture somewhere domesticated a beast of burden that was more efficient and versatile than horse or cattle, they themselves would eventually be displaced. I suppose the pickup truck qualifies.
We see this with plants too. Cassava from the new world moved to Africa and actually displaced native African crops. The plants of the Northeast Agricultural complex in North America were displaced by Meso-American crops moving north. Subsistence farmers are generally conservative, by nature, but over time, they have the same economics as anyone else. If a particular domesticate grows better, grows faster, has a better yield or it takes less effort, then cultivation will shift there. Homegrown varieties will either become marginal or get abandoned entirely.
I suspect that if we looked around hard enough, there’s archaeological discoveries to be made in failed domestications. Plants (and even a few animals) that were domesticated and then abandoned as more effective rivals arrived and displaced them.
Or maybe not - once the effort to create a successful domesticate is made and the domesticate takes hold, it tends to spread relatively rapidly through its range. Not only are less efficient rivals swept away, but likely, most potential candidates don’t even get the chance to become domesticated.
It strikes me that there are a lot more edible plants, or plant parts, eaten wild by indigenous peoples, or subsistence gatherers than there are domesticated plants.
In fact, a lot of domesticated plants involve a certain amount of work and processing to be made edible. Cereal grains for instance, are actually process and labour intensive. Most of them have to be ground down to flour and then prepared and baked up. Quinoa, Cassava both have to be rinsed and boiled. That begs the question - why did we bother domesticating these plants, if we have to go through all this trouble, not just to grow them, but to prepare them into a form that can be eaten? I’m sure that there were potential rivals that weren’t such a pain in the butt.
Let me throw out a bunch of random thoughts - this is me thinking out loud.
First, in terms of productivity - I think that there’s usually going to be a gap between a wild form and the domesticated form. To say that some wild plants aren’t domesticated because other plants that are domesticated are much more productive isn’t necessarily an answer or the whole answer.
Any systematically domesticated plant, even by subsistence farmers, will go through generations, potentially dozens or hundreds of generations of selective breeding to maximize efficiency and productivity. You can see this with any number of fruits or vegetables, with maize, etc. The wild forms are shrivelled beans, the domesticated ones tend to be full ripe tubers, melons, etc. etc.
So potentially, it seems to me that you could probably take most wild edibles, and over a reasonably short period of time - a few years, perhaps decades, produce something that’s very productive and diverges strongly, and given a few centuries, something maximally productive. I suspect the process happens relatively quickly, just because cultures need a real return on investment.
Plants are probably easier to domesticate and maximize productivity than animals - animals are more mobile and have behaviour.
I think one factor that gets in the way of domestication is easy growth and ready availability. Take Ground Cherries, as Cozort mentions. They’re literally edible weeds. They grow easily, without encouragement. There’s no real need to domesticate them. Domesticating takes time and effort, agriculture takes time and effort. Why invest time and effort in something that grows wild and that you can harvest without effort. Even if domesticating ground berries for agriculture would give you a greater yield of ground berries, that’s not a good enough answer. You can get a lesser yield with no effort whatsoever beyond harvesting. You can get a greater yield, but that will involve a significant increase in effort - is the increase in effort cost effective? Historically, subsistence peoples will generally choose a smaller yield for free, than a greater yield at significant costs.
So if an edible plant is readily available, there’s no real reason to cultivate it. That’s just extra work. You can cultivate it and do the extra work but is the yield going to be significantly greater to justify that extra work? Particularly when you can walk around and harvest for free. And particularly where that extra work is a trade-off - you can put that extra time and labour to any number of other uses that might be more productive.
I’m going to raise the heretical proposition that maybe agriculture emerges at the fringes of a plant or animal’s range. That there are borders or boundaries where the economics change. Where a little bit of effort makes a significant difference in yield. Basically, where a plant may have difficulty propagating or spreading, but where some minimal casual or horticultural investment produces a visible, measurable significant improvement on yield.
It’s just a hunch. But call it my “free lunch hunch.” If you can have a plant or animal for free (or for minimal effort) where’s the incentive for systematic management?
I do find it interesting that there are agricultural practices all over the place, oriented to raising domesticates beyond their normal range. The Māori practiced raised platform agriculture, to sustain a tropical agricultural suite in temperate regions. The Canary Islanders evolved their own ‘microclimate agriculture.’ Stone cover agriculture shows up in multiple places. The Norse invested massive time and effort into barns to sustain their cattle in subarctic locations.
Anyway, that’s my private theory that Agriculture develops in borderlands.
I suspect that many, perhaps the majority of edible wild plants can probably be domesticated and produce forms that are much more productive than their wild counterparts. So potentially, we have many more plant domestication and usage opportunities. The cupboards are far from empty.
And in terms of alternate history, there are likely possible roads not taken, and possible opportunities not exploited. Some of which may be exploited in the future.
I did a failed collaboration (in that I had the ideas and did 99.99% of the work) with Guy Deschamps called “Land of Ice and Mice” (a pretty obvious tribute to Jared Kavanaugh). And in it, I speculated on the domestication of arctic plants, supported by stone cover agriculture and microclimate engineering, which sustained an Inuit agricultural complex and proto-civilization.
On the one hand, the concept seems ridiculous. Inuit agriculture? But that was part of the appeal - doing something because it’s hard. Taking the impossible or implausible, and trying to make it work.
The thing is though, that in the Arctic, food has to be flown in at an exorbitant cost. Eight-dollar heads of lettuce in Churchill, Manitoba. Twenty-seven dollar bunches of Asparagus in Fort Smith, NWT, Thirteen-dollar cauliflower in Iqualuit. It’s not just the distance, which is extreme, but many communities are accessible only by air, or only seasonally through winter roads, etc. Food prices across the north are extraordinary, and food insecurity is high.
Well, I’ve seen all sorts of solutions proposed from zeppelins to greenhouses, all of which involve energy and technology.
Maybe another viable solution is to move towards domesticating and refining indigenous plants for better yield, and more systematic cultivation. Obviously, stone cover won’t work with modern agricultural methods, and microclimate engineering conflicts with the sort of large-scale production. The subsistence model of Ice and Mice isn’t translatable to modern agriculture.
Nevertheless, if you’ve got 50% food insecurity up north, and the insanely skewed economics and costs, maybe this is something that should be explored someway. A productive domesticated descendant of claytonia tuberosa or sweetvetch may be a pathway. For that matter, a more domesticated, managed relationship with Musk Ox, Caribou, even Moose or Elk, may give us directions forward.
Right now, we’re existing in a historical epoch where agriculture is massively mechanized, operating with heavy industrial inputs ranging from machinery to fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and irrigation. I’m not sure how long term viable that kind of brute force approach is. I think it’s with us for the long term, but the downsides and costs are becoming apparent, and maybe across the planet, there’s room for more diverse, more finely tailored management and production.
I think that’s one of the inspiring things about Jared’s Land of Red and Gold. Not just an allohistory. But perhaps a possibility for a future.
Of course, it’s interesting to think that our modern civilization is the beneficiary of a thousand local laboratories. Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes, Maize, Cassava, Peanuts, Carrots, Chickens you name it, were all relatively confined. Now everything is spread literally all over the world. A village in Africa or Honduras, or Alberta, now has potential access to grow plants from literally every continent on the planet. Even if our civilization collapses, our survivors will have a suite of domesticates available to work with, that our ancestors could only dream of.
Don’t mind me, I’m just kind of rambling. I think I’ve lost the track though.
Some things do seem genuinely hard or impossible to domesticate, not necessarily because they’re ornery, but because it’s just difficult or impossible to manage the breeding. Cheetahs are an example - they need lots of open country.
But consider Coconut Crabs. Chicken-sized arthropods. Apparently decent eating. But the trouble is that the larva are basically free-ocean plankton. Hard to breed them up. Plants which are wind seeded or wind fertilized, that’s tough to breed selectively, when a good breeze can come in, commingling your domesticated product with wild forms and ruining your effort.
There’s a variety of issues involved in life cycles. In animals, we generally like fast breeders and fast growers. We especially like animals that produce litters, although we’re not entirely wedded. The more time and energy we have to spend on an animal in its growth and breeding stage, the longer we have to wait to harvest or put it to work, the more the economics work against us. The fussier it is - the more it has special needs or environment, like being a pure meat eater, the more the cost/benefit choices work against it.
But economics and circumstances do change. There are alligator farms and mink farms. And while neither of those are domesticated, if there was stable long-term motivation for enough generations, I could see the possibility.
Anyway, fun discussion.
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