Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Reay Tannahill's Food in History (©1973 by Reay Tannahill).

The fields of wild grain which sprang up in the Near East twelve thousand years ago did more than help to feed humankind. They also attracted a number of those smaller animals which had begun to multiply in the open shade around the margins of the forests. In the early part of the growing season the raids made by wild goats and sheep on the new grain sprouting in the fields must have been a serious threat to the villagers' future food supply. They had three options—to exterminate the flocks, to defend the fields, or to bring the animals under control (which had the overriding advantage of ensuring the meat as well as the grain supply).

Domesticating the sheep and the goat may have been a comparatively easy task. Both were gregarious; where one led, the others would follow. In some villages it may have been commonplace to adopt orphan baby animals as pets, and a hand-reared ewe allowed to mate with a wild sire would, in the course of a few years, help to establish a village flock.

Whether the sheep or the goat was the first animal to be domesticated remains an open question, though the balance of probabilities favors the goat—an animal which has been greatly maligned through the ages, for its destructive browsing habits as well as its pungent smell. But during the early expansion of farming, in areas where scrub had to be cleared to make way for cultivation, its talent for killing plants by defoliation may have made the goat a useful agricultural laborer.

In the case of the sheep the first stages in domestication had certainly taken place by about 8920 B.C. at Zawi Chemi Shanidar in Iraq, and at Dobrudja in Rumania. But such dates and places are not necessarily definitive. The sheep may originally have been tamed by hunters in cooler regions such as the Kara Kum, east of the Caspian. Long before spinning and weaving were invented, it was possible to make wool into a warm natural felt which was invaluable in a cold climate. A single sheep, however, can eat a hundredweight of greenstuff in a week, and the earliest herdsmen must have been kept constantly on the move in search of new grazing lands. Many would tend to move west, towards the lush pastures of Iraq, and it may have been from such nomads that the peoples of newly settled villages like Zawi Chemi Shanidar learned the techniques of sheep herding.

The pig arrived third in the barnyard, although the occasion seems to have been delayed until about 7000 B.C. One of the reasons may have been that the pig, unlike ruminant animals一goats, sheep, cattle, reindeer, and camel, for example一cannot digest straw, grass, leaves, or twigs. Pig-rearing, in fact, could not be embarked on until humans were prepared to invest some of their own food一nuts, acorns, meat scraps, cooked grain—in the enterprise.

The last major food animal to be domesticated was the cow, not apparently in the heartland areas of the neolithic, but (depending on the outcome of a current archeological controversy) either in Catal Huyuk in Turkey or Nea Nicomedia in Macedonia, at some time between 6100 B.C. and 5800 B.C. The task may have been postponed because of the difficulties involved. Though the ancestral type of the domesticated breed died out in the seventeenth century, attempts have been made in Munich and Berlin in the last twenty years to re-create it. If the fiery and agile modern version is anything to go by, neolithic man must have had his hands full with the original... .

Since their hunting days, humans had known that, in addition to meat, the goat provided glossy waterproof hair, and a skin which made a first-class water container; that the sheep supplied wool, and substantial quantities of fat, useful not only for cooking but as an ingredient in medicinal salves and as tallow for rushlights and lamps; that the pig's bristles were as valuable as its lard and its skin; that the cow's hide was tough and strong, and its dung an excellent fuel for the fire. But, almost certainly, it was only after the first of these animals had been domesticated that humans learned about milk and the numerous ways in which it could be used and preserved. This new foodstuff, which was to become of the greatest importance to later generations, was one of the two unlooked-for benefits of domestication. The second was that the goat, sheep and ox could be pressed into service as agricultural laborers, made to sow seeds, pull the plough, and thresh the ripe grain. The barnyard animal became, in effect, humankind's first power tool.