Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

vesting crops. Once humanity started down the agricultural road there was
no turning back.
Learning to support more people on less land once they settled into a
region, farmers could always marshal greater numbers to defeat foragers in
contests over territory. As their numbers grew farmers became unbeatable
on their own turf. Field by field, farms expanded to cover as much of the
land as could be worked with the technology of the day.
Most farm animals were domesticated from about 10,000 to 6000 bc.
My favorite exception, the dog, was brought into the human fold more
than twenty thousand years earlier. I can easily imagine the scenario in
which a young wolf or orphaned puppies would submit to human rule and
join a pack of human hunters. Watching dogs run in Seattle’s off-leash
parks, I see how hunters could use dogs as partners in the hunt, especially
the ones that habitually turn prey back toward the pack. In any case, dogs
were not domesticated for direct consumption. There is no evidence that
early people ate their first animal allies. Instead, dogs increased human
hunting efficiency and probably served as sentries in early hunting camps.
(Cats were relative latecomers, as they moved into agricultural settlements
roughly four thousand years ago, soon after towns first overlapped with
their range. As people settled their habitat, cats faced a simple choice:
starve, go somewhere else, or find food in the towns. No doubt early farmers
appreciated cats less for their social skills than for their ability to catch
the small mammals that ate stored grain.)
Sheep were domesticated for direct consumption and economic exploitation
sometime around 8000 bc, several hundred years before domestication
of wheat and barley. Goats were domesticated at about the same
time in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. It is possible that seeds for
the earliest of these crops were gathered to grow livestock fodder.
Cattle were first domesticated in Greece or the Balkans about 6000 b.c.
They rapidly spread into the Middle East and across Europe. A revolutionary
merger of farming and animal husbandry began when cattle
reached the growing agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia. With the
development of the plow, cattle both worked and fertilized the fields. Conscription
of animal labor increased agricultural productivity and allowed
human populations to grow dramatically. Livestock provided labor that
freed part of the agricultural population from fieldwork.
The contemporaneous development of crop production and animal
husbandry reinforced each other; both allowed more food to be produced.
Sheep and cattle turn parts of plants we can’t eat into milk and meat.
rivers of life 35