It seems obvious that selection for affinity to humans would occur naturally over time, with humans being a good food source (trash, if nothing else), and animals that were proximate to humans but non threatening becoming very successful over time.

Does the Norwegian rat count as having been domesticated?

Yes, people keep them as pets, play with them, etc.

There are also large wild populations.

Not all rats are good at being pets. If they were, the bushy tailed wood rat would be in every pet store

I can't argue with that, but the question was about Norwegian rats. The bushy-tailed wood rat isn't even in the same taxonomic family. It's just called a rat.

There are many animals who have such affinity with humans, but most of them have not been successfully domesticated, so it's not that simple.

And it does seem rather obvious on its face that animals exhibiting certain kinds of social behavior, for example, would more readily adapt to a symbiotic relationship with humans than others.

None of them can pull a plow or carry a soldier.

I haven’t read much about Inuit warfare, but there was nothing stopping them from using their dogs, bred for hauling heavy loads over vast distances, for carry soldiers. Same with the llamas. No doubt the Inkas used llamas for warfare, and if they wanted to, they probably could have bred them to carry soldiers, just like how camels and dromedaries were.

Also, North America had buffalo. I fail to see anything inherent in the North American buffalo which would prevent it from being bred to plow a field the same way that the Water Buffalo in Asia was bred.

Most likely the agricultural practices and warfare was different in the Americas which never drove the people living there to breed their animals for the same trades as in Europe and Asia.

My god, reading some of these comments is like pulling teeth. "But what about...", how about some of these people stop and think about their arguments first before just randomly throwing them into the open? I don't understand this form of discussion or what they hope to achieve with these ridiculously weak "aha" arguments that simply don't hold water. Is it bad faith? Bad education? Lack of self-reflection?

Well I think it's safe to say that near 0% of people have read his book, and the hypothesis put forward is far from intuitive. It's also easy to see it as probably being motivated by ideology, as it falls right in line with certain social trends. So this is going to have a pretty polarizing effect. People who adopt to said ideology are going to be inclined to accept it with minimal questioning, and vice versa people who challenge said ideology are probably just going to eye roll and completely dismiss it with about as much consideration as the equal but opposite group gave it.

So it would probably help if somebody compellingly laid out his hypothesis, at least as it relates to animals, while making some reasonable effort to account for the countless self evident arguments against it.

That is right, I haven’t read the book, and I’m probably never going to. I’ve read some of Diamonds other work, and I have heard this argument a lot (particularly about the animals) and like you said, there is a lot of self evident arguments against it. Not just the fact that there were domesticated animals in the Americas, but also like the buffalo existed (and was probably semi-domesticated like the reindeer in Sápmi) and could probably be domesticated just as easily as the Water Buffalo in Asia.

But I have a deeper problem with Diamond’s book, and the main reason I will probably never read this book, is the fact that I believe he is asking the wrong question. The question of European colonization should not be about capability, but of consequence.

Brutal armies have in the past from all over the world been able to siege, occupy, colonize and genocide vast areas with nothing superior but their brutality. The Mongol army for examlple might have had a superior breed of horses, but what they had above else was complete disregard of the human lives of their victims. Same with the Huns, or the Japanese imperial army, and yes, colonial Europe.

Guns Germs and Steel (the explanation, not the book) sound to me like a post hoc analysis, an overfit if you will, to fit history neatly between the lines, and tie it together with a nice bow. Asking the question, „but how could Europe do this?“ is an extremely colonialist thing to do, a euro-centric world view. If Jared Diamond wanted to do history, he wouldn’t ask this question. He would ask: „what were the consequences of actual people victims of these crimes?“ Yes this is ideology, but I would argue that Diamond is also full of an awful world view which doesn’t fit in historic analysis of this century.

how long they live before reproduction, reproduction rate, edibility (while you're waiting for them to be tame), in-captivity behavior, what they eat, etc matter a lot since they are the variables going into the equation for how many 100s or thousands of years you're going to have to devote to this.

Also, if they are basically useless now, most groups won't even realize there's a point to starting to tame them.

Technically, perhaps, but maybe it takes more time than a low-tech society can afford. That's close enough to untameable for practical purposes.

Why could a low tech society not afford time?

A low tech society may not have the surplus to run a wild animal breeding programme for multiple generations without interruption.

I think in this theory, it wouldn't be a program so much as it is people leaving scraps behind, animals learning that humans are a beneficial food source, and a symbiotic relationship naturally developing over time (measured in centuries).

That's very much an example of having the animal become tameable before breeding them in captivity.

Yes, thank you, that's more precisely put.

That's not always true.