Diane Gifford-Gonzalez

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez is an American archaeologist who specializes in the field of zooarchaeology. Her research has included fieldwork near Lake Turkana that borders Kenya and Ethiopia, and her research often touches on the question of animal domestication.

Gifford-Gonzalez is based out of the state of California, with a specialty in Zooarchaeology. She attended the University of California-Berkley where she got her B.A., M.A., and her Ph.D. Along with being President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists, she has served on boards for that organization along with so many others, such as: the International Conference of Archaeozoology (ICAZ), the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), and the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. She is currently the President-elect for the Society of American Archaeology. She was also on the Academic Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Long-Range Planning Committee of the American Anthropological Association. Plus, she is on the editorial boards for African Archaeological Review, Journal of African Archaeology, California Archaeology, and Teals d’Arqueologia.

She has worked at universities in California (Santa Cruz), Nairobi, Tromsø, la Universidad del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Academia Sinica, Beijing, China. She retired from teaching at the end of the academic year in 2015.

Gifford-Gonzalez's work at Lake Turkana on the border of Ethiopia and Kenya has put her at the forefront of scholars who study pastoralism in that area. She specializes in the study of the domestication of donkeys, cattle, sheep, and goats, and the importance that these animals had on the peoples who lived, and continue to live, at Lake Turkana. Along with Fiona Marshall, she studies when animals were domesticated and why there seems to be a lag in the appearance of domesticated animals in eastern Africa. Cattle found at Pastoral Neolithic sites near Lake Turkana came from northern Africa after the Sahara started to dry out. These animals were also helpful in maintaining the savanna's grasslands with their constant grazing and the pastoralists' burning of the grasslands.

Although these cattle were and are an important part of the pastoral economy of Africa, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez and others have found that cattle domestication in Eastern and Southern Africa was delayed by as much as a millennium past everywhere else. The tentative date for domestication of cattle is set around 9000 BP. Archaeologists that work at sites dating back to the 10th millennia; such as Nabta Playa, claim that cattle remains found at their sites come from domestic cattle. The basis of these archaeologist arguments is that cattle are not usually found with certain kinds of desert-adapted animals that they are also finding at these sites. Even so, Gifford-Gonzalez is not entirely sure that the genetic findings should be fully trusted as there is a wide-margin for errors in the findings. This delay occurred even though the ancestor of the modern, domestic cattle was originally from northern Africa. One cause of this delay may have been the uncharacteristically wet-period that went through eastern Africa from 12,500-7000 BP, where rainfall was 35% higher than it is today. This wet period caused all the lakes and rivers to rise dramatically and changed all the flora of the area so that they were less grassland-like and more forest-like. Once the rainfall dropped to more modern levels in 3000 BP, pastoralism picked up as well. Along with the steadying of the rains, there is also evidence of Nderit ceramics that appears in south-central Kenya between 5000 BP and 4000 BP. Nderit pottery found south of Lake Turkana is usually associated with local hunter-gatherers. Local hunter-gatherers may have adopted these ceramics and a few domestic animals while still practicing their hunting-and-gathering lifestyles. Another cause for the delay could have been due to disease of the cattle, such as Bovine Malignant Catarrhal Fever (MCF), which is almost 100% lethal for cattle. Another problem she found was the diseases that affect humans, such as Rift Valley Fever (RVF), East Coast Fever (ECF), foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), and trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). As of right now, it is impossible to tell if coming into contact with cattle caused epidemics of unfamiliar diseases.

Gifford-Gonzalez has also studied early evidence for fishing around Lake Turkana. Fishing has typically been located at sites that are dated later in the archaeological record, like the periods of the Upper Paleolithic, Later Stone Age, or the Holocene; usually with anatomically modern humans. Contrary to the belief, there has been evidence of fishing at Lake Rutanzige, Olduvai Gorge, and Lake Turkana that date from the late Pliocene to the Late Pleistocene. That would mean that there is evidence of fishing before there was any species with the genus Homo on Earth yet. Gifford-Gonzalez then raises the question: was it possible for pre-hominids to have collected the knowledge of how to fish and passed it down to Homo sapiens? In order to find the answers to this question, she and her colleague Kathlyn Stewart studied 19 pastoralist communities; 18 of these communities being of the Dassanetch people who live on the banks in the lower Omo River valley. They found that the Dassanetch people were completely self-sufficient on their own livestock and from the things they could get from the nearby river. They even have a specific status that is called gal dies that announces a person as a "fisherman" or someone without cattle. All this ethnographic work with the Dassanetch people when compared to the fossil evidence found from Olduvai Gorge was unable to help Gifford Gonzalez and Stewart come to a clear conclusion that answered their question but it gave them a starting point for further research.

She has also been a part of genetic testing of animals that can show where an animal was domesticated. Some of the genetics that she has studied show that there are relations between the cattle from South Asia, Africa, and Europe. It used to be thought that Africa had no unique domesticates of is own but this data has tentatively pointed to an independent domestication process of cattle in Africa. The genetic studies of cattle can show that African and European taurine's lineage diverged somewhere in the 22nd–26th millennia BP. The analyses point to domestication of European stock around 5000 BP and African stock being around 9000 BP, even if this date of domestication is a point of controversy. The domestication process is sometimes glossed over as an invention by humans and not a process that is biological and evolutionary. But Diane Gifford-Gonzalez argues that animal domestication is an ongoing, dynamic system of interaction with animals that causes lasting changes to that animal. Domestication is more of a co-evolution for the animals because the reproducing animals are usually chosen by the humans and they are now living in a human-structured environment which changes their behavior. Not only do the animals change their behavior, humans also change their behavior to be able to coexist alongside the animals. Sometimes the genes inside the humans can actually change; like in Eurasia and East Africa, adult genes changed to accommodate the influx of milk in their diets and to allow them digest it. Through the selective-breeding that these animals are put through throughout the process of domestication, there is also the ‘unconscious selection’ that goes along with it. These 'unconscious selections' usually refer to the physical characteristics of the animal; such as wolves looking more like modern-day dogs after 10 generations of selective-breeding. The reason inherently African animals like gazelles and monkeys were not able to be domesticated was to do with some of the animal's traits. Gazelles for example are prone to getting panicked when they are caged and mortally injure themselves from trying to jump out. Genetic studies may clarify whether or not animals such as cattle were independently domesticated in northern Africa.

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez has been very influential in her writing. Her article "Domesticating Animals in Africa: Implications of Genetics and Archaeological Findings" from 2011 with Olivier Hanotte has been cited 81 times (as of December 2016). One of the articles that cites this article is "First Dairying in Green Saharan Africa in the Fifth Millennium BC" by Julie Dunne et al. from 2012. They also argue that a dependence on pastoralism and animals like cattle, sheep, goats, and donkeys emerged from the "Green Sahara" which was in opposition to the Neolithic that happened in Europe and Eurasia. They also use Gifford-Gonzalez's work to discuss when and where the remains of early cattle domesticates were found in Africa to help the argument of when cattle were first domesticated. Finally they use her work and discuss what makes her research so notable. According the Dunne et al., her work is notable for four reasons: first, the early date for domesticated cattle in North Africa can be used to prove the early immigration into the central region of the Sahara; second, it shows that the ancient peoples of the area where collecting and processing milk from the milk residue found in the pottery of the area; thirdly, it confirms the evolution of the "−13910*T allele" that is found in some adults that is linked to the ability to digest lactase and supports the movement of people from Africa to the rest of the world; and fourthly, it also provides context for other, seemingly random appearances of genes in humans.

One of her other papers; "Bones Are Not Enough: Analogues, Knowledge, and Interpretive Strategies in Zooarchaeology" (1991), has been cited 210 times (as of December 2016). Shannon Mcpherson et al., in their article "Evidence for Stone-Tool-Assisted Consumption of Animal Tissues Before 3.39 Million Years Ago at Dikka, Ethiopia" (2010), use Gifford-Gonzalez's article to help make their argument. They make an argument about marks on bones, and how certain marks that can be seen were deliberately created by humans with tools.