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Animal Husbandry - The Foundation of Human Civilization (part2)

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The story of animal husbandry ended up being longer than expected, so I cut it into two posts to avoid overloading . W hen we ended part 1, we covered the story of dogs, sheep, goats, pigs and bovines. Now, time to go into more ‘recent’ additions to our societies.   Horses and donkeys came surprisingly late in the party , especially with how iconic the former is in our history you’d think they’ve been hanging around for much longer. Starting with horses in 3,000 BCE , their history is a bit weird to begin with. Native to the Americas, they crossed to Eurasia during the last glaciation when Russia and Alaska were connected . Over time, they became extinct in their homeland before being reintroduced by Europeans millennia later. Meanwhile, w ild horses prospered in the great steppes of Eurasia, before being domesticated for the first time in the black sea regions by nomads. These animals would rapidly become the center point of all nomadic people, as their travel capabilitie...

Animal Husbandry - The Foundation of Human Civilization

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Humans were able to evolve from hunter-gatherer wandering tribes into settled cities, well for the most part at least, thanks to a multitude of developments. These include, but are not limited to, architecture, pottery, and agriculture, providing shelter, storage and food for the community to live on. One such development, which actually started long before sedentary societies began, played one of the biggest roles in t he appearance and evolution of advanced societies: animal husbandry. The implementation of animals within our communities has brought tremendous changes to our lives , for the better and for the worse but more on that later. While most people tend to think of animal husbandry is limited to livestock, the truth is that they were practically everywhere within ancient societies, from work horses (literally or not) to guard animals and even religious figures and symbols of status. Alongside everything, the art of taming wild beasts started with one in particul...

Yamata No Orochi - The Demon Serpent of Japan

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Before the arrival of outside religions, like Buddhism, Christianism or Islam, Japan had developed it owns believes and mythology called Shintoism. A polytheist religion, their pantheon of beings where called the Kami which referred to gods as much as demons and monsters. Among them stood the dragons, which while keeping the reptilian nature of their western cousins remained completely different. Instead of being fire breathing winged lizards hoarding treasures and tormenting the mortals, Eastern Asian dragons took on a more serpentine form and acted more as forces of nature, being both benevolent and oppressing . Among them stood one in particular , named Yamata no Orochi, known for being an evil creature who tormented a family being eating the daughters one at a time every years ... okay so level of epicness we’ve seen better but anyway. The elderly couple, completely out of their depth against such a terrible beast, could do nothing but watch their daughters being devoured ye...