Gallery 2 of 16 · About 10,500 years ago

Domestication

Where, when and how four wild animals came to live with people, and how archaeologists can tell.

About 10,500 years ago

Where it began: the hills of the Fertile Crescent

historybiology

Sheep, goats, cattle and pigs were all first tamed in the arc of hills from southeastern Turkey through northern Iraq to western Iran, within roughly a thousand years of each other, about 10,500 years ago. Farmers who were also learning to grow wheat and barley began keeping the animals they had once hunted.

Four animals, one region, one millennium: the start of the farm.

Sources: Zeder, PNAS 105 (2008); Larson and Fuller, Annual Review (2014)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

Archaeology and DNA

How we know: bones, ages and genes

biologyhistory

A herded flock leaves a different pile of bones from a hunted one: herders kill young males and keep females, so the ages and sexes shift. Animals also shrink under human care. Since the 1990s ancient DNA has added a second witness, tracing each species to its wild source.

Students can read a bone pile the way an archaeologist does.

Sources: Zeder and Hesse, Science 287 (2000)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

About 9,000 to 8,000 years ago

More than one beginning

historybiology

Pigs were tamed a second time in China, and humped zebu cattle in the Indus Valley, independently of the Near East. Domestication was not one invention that spread, but an idea that several peoples reached on their own.

A good classroom puzzle: invention or diffusion?

Sources: Larson et al., Science 307 (2005)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

About 6,000 to 5,000 years ago

The secondary products revolution

historyeconomics

At first people kept animals for meat. Later they learned to take milk, wool and pulling power from living animals, again and again, without killing them. The archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called this the secondary products revolution; woolly sheep and woven wool cloth spread across Mesopotamia in this age.

Wool is a product you can harvest every year from the same animal.

Sources: Andrew Sherratt, "Plough and Pastoralism," in Pattern of the Past (Cambridge, 1981); Ryder, Sheep and Man (1983)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

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