Animal Husbandry - The Foundation of Human Civilization (part2)

The story of animal husbandry ended up being longer than expected, so I cut it into two posts to avoid overloading. When 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, wild 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 capabilities are virtually unmatched by most other land animals. On top of this, while not oxen-level, they can carry a decent load, making them extremely versatile. Horses would rapidly make their way into sedentary societies, starting as messengers and lighter work animals before joining the military front. You can read more on that topic in my Chariots and Cataphract posts.

Donkeys tend to be a bit more obscure than horses, playing a less glamorous role, probably being the cause of this. These animals were mostly employed in the more arid regions of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, being uniquely adapted to these regions donkeys could lift surprisingly heavy loads given their size and carry them for a long distance. This strength also made them good travel mounts and working animals, even if they were not as effective as horses and oxen. But since they had the perk of not dying to the environment, this ultimately won out. Camels would also show up around that time, although in South America, while Africa and Eurasia would take a millennium and a half to catch up. Around the same time horses were being domesticated, the Mesoamerican people in the Andes were doing the same with the Llamas and Alpacas. The latter served as beasts of burden, since oxen and horses were not available to the Andes, while the latter offered excellent wool, as, just like horses, the region had no sheep. Roughly a millennium and a half later, the Bedouin people of the Arabian Peninsula would tame the camel, the ultimate desert survivor. Oh, and fun fact, Llamas and Camels belong to the same family.

We’ve spoken a lot about the Western Hemisphere so far, but the Eastern one has its own stories about animal domestication. Starting with the elephant, they were first brought into human societies in the lands of India, to no real surprise and were first used as pack animals. The precise timeline of when they started to become beasts of war isn’t known, but their role in the military was firmly established by the 3rd century BCE. Africa took a bit longer to keep up, mainly because African elephants are a bit bigger and more temperamental than their Indian counterparts. Further east, chickens would enter our plates in Indo-China, because yes, they are native to this region. But it is China that really stands out in all of this, having tamed the only insect species to be fully domesticated, as the silkmoth does not exist at all in the wild and is completely reliant on human care for survival. The adult moths are incapable of flight, while the larvae don’t have the capacity to find their sole food source, Mulberry leaves. This contrasts with the honeybee, another widespread domesticated insect, as if a hive is left on its own, the bees can still find their own food and protect themselves. Meanwhile, the silkmoth only exists because silk was deemed a valuable resource by mankind. 

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