Domestication of the Donkey: Aridity, Mobility and the Development of African Pastoral Societies

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Fiona Marshall and an international team of colleagues will conduct three years of archaeological and genetic research in northeast Africa, western Europe and the U.S.A. The team brings together U.S., Portuguese/French, and Eritrean specialists in archaeology, zoology, and modern and ancient genetics to examine the process and timing of domestication of the donkey. Ancient use of domestic animals has shaped global trajectories of social change, as well as the biodiversity of contemporary livestock. Humans have domesticated few large mammals, however, and most for food. Donkeys (Equus asinus) provided the only means of large-scale transport for much of the ancient world. Although donkey's and mules are still important pack animals in many areas of Africa, Asia, and South America today, and mules played a key role in western societies up through the Second World War, very little is known about the context of their domestication. The wild ancestor of the donkey, the African wild ass (Equus africanus), is found in northeastern Africa. Because donkeys appear in Predynastic Egyptian sites in Africa (6-5 kyr bp), scholars have suggested that ancient Egyptians domesticated the donkey for transport and trade. Domestication in Asia has also been considered. This project considers the alternative hypothesis that donkeys were domesticated in Africa by ancient northeast African cattle herders (7-6.5 kyr bp), as the region became more arid and rainfall increasingly unpredictable. Today, donkeys play a critical role in assisting African herding societies to cope with unpredictable climatic fluctuations. They are used to collect water and firewood, and to transport household structures, goods, young stock, and children. Use of donkeys allows herders greater mobility with which to face erratic rainfall, and improves the health and population dynamics of humans and livestock. The nature of the research question requires collection of zooarchaeological data in three different areas, collection of modern reference material, morphometric study of modern skeletons, and analysis of archaeological specimens. Collection of four modern African wild ass skeletons in Eritrea and four donkey skeletons in Kenya will strengthen scant existing Museum collections of African ass. Morphometric data, measurements, and x-rays collected from 18 modern donkeys and 12 modern African wild ass skeletons will contribute new, methods to discriminate between donkeys and their wild ancestor. Zooarchaeological studies will be conducted of African wild ass and donkeys from six northeast African archaeological sites ranging in age from 12-2,000 kyr bp. Ten ancient wild ass samples will be submitted for AMS dates, and 15 for DNA analysis. The project will clarify the question of where and when the donkey was domesticated and incorporated into early pastoral systems in Africa. The intellectual merit of the research will be to contribute to longstanding debates over southwest Asian vs. African origins of the donkey, to provide new understanding of variation in domestication processes among large mammals, and to reshape current understanding of the development of African pastoralism. The broader impacts of this project are that it will contribute to conservation of biodiversity, through assembling skeletal and genetic information on one of the world's most endangered large wild mammals, the African wild ass. The project also draws on synergies among current objectives in archaeology, livestock development, and conservation biology, and will contribute to all three. Infrastructure for future studies will be created, including new reference skeletal material, and a published and on-line database of bone measurements for African wild ass and donkey, modern and ancient. The latter will facilitate identification of isolated specimens in countries and locations without comparative material. This project also promotes interdisciplinary international collaboration among geneticists, zoologists, and zooarchaeologists in Europe, Africa, and the U.S.A.