Animal Husbandry - The Foundation of Human Civilization

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 the 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 particular, which gave the idea of trying this on the others that came after. This animal in particular has been sharing our lives for an extremely long time, in fact for far longer than the other combines, earning it a special stature among cultures around the world: the dog.

It is not a secret that modern dogs evolved from wolves, even if sometimes the resemblance can be hard to spot when it comes to modern breeds. Our connection to them is traced all the way back to the Upper Paleolithic, long before our ancestors settled in the first cities and built empires. Many theories have sprung from how this first step was taken, ranging from early wolves gravitating toward human camps for food, to both sides forming a silent agreement when hunting large game. In the end, finding a single answer is completely impossible, and it is safe to bet there isn’t even one to begin with, considering how fragmented this development was. The one thing that is sure is that these early wolves won the evolutionary lottery, as getting on the good side of the single most successful and deadly animal to ever walk the earth is definitely one way to avoid being killed off to extinction.

The next step in animal husbandry would wait several thousand more years, waiting for the development of the first cities and agriculture to take form shortly after the 9,000 BCA mark. This would involve the usual suspects of herding: sheep, cows, goats, and pigs. Of these four, sheep and goats came first as they were both relatively easy to raise thanks to their calm nature, herd mentality, and varied diet, while being mobile enough to follow the still prevalent wandering tribes. Both animals not only provided good food sources in their meat and milk, but also safer access to clothing material from their wool and hide. As more and more settled societies formed up, a more robust food source was needed, as sheep and goats had a hard time keeping up with the demand. Our ancestors found the answer in pigs, who were overlooked because they have a harder time travelling long distances and wild boars have a very nasty temper. However, they not only provided far more meats than their contemporaries but have also the single most diverse diet among land animals, not seriously they can eat anything. Cattles where the last of the four to show up, needing far more resources to herd but offers not only the best food source but also excellent working animals, for both fields and transport. One thing to consider is that pigs and oxen only became available to fully sedentary societies. People living in less hospitable lands like tundras, deep deserts, or heavy jungles where agriculture was impossible, farm animals stayed limited to sheep and goats, sometimes. 

Cats’ history is a bit more difficult to trace, although we know they appear sometime between the entry of Oxen in our societies and the horses. What makes cats particularly difficult to trace is that they strayed far less from their wild ancestors than our main group had. The fact that they are also the only ones to not live in a herd makes them less attached to us by default. They still played their role among us, as while dogs guard us from large threats, like predators and rival humans, they instead targeted small pests like rats or mice, which not only targeted grain storages but also helped with the spread of diseases.

Speaking of which, when I said earlier that animal husbandry didn’t just bring benefits to us, well, now we get to the nasty part. The increase in settlement densities coupled with the incorporation of more animals in our lives created the first viral outbreaks, as microbes and bacteria now had the perfect breeding spots to develop.

Next will come in part 2

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