Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
2
S
EDENTARY
P
IGS
,
N
OMADIC
C
OWS
, U
RBAN
C
HICKENS
The emergence of the great Western cattle cultures and the emergence of world capitalism are inseparable.
Jeremy Rifkin
It could be said that European civilization - and Chinese civilization too - has been founded on the pig.
Jane Grigson
I
n respect of their environmental performance, carnivores didn't get off to a very good
start. Round about 11,000 BC as the glaciers of the last ice age receded, five Eurasian spe-
cies of large mammal (the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino, the giant elk, the musk ox
and the steppe bison) were hunted to extinction. In the Americas and Australia the record
was even worse: by 7,000 BC, 32 genera of large animals, including horses, giant bison, ox-
en, elephants, camels, antelopes, pig, ground sloths and giant rodents had disappeared from
the future New World. Nobody is quite sure to what extent their extinction was due to cli-
mate change, but there is little doubt that human predators had a hand in the matter.
1
The problem for humans at the time was that they didn't have much else to live off
(though they did appear to pick off one preferred species before moving onto the next). Once
humans had learnt how to practise agriculture, and how to domesticate animals - two pro-
cesses which happened more or less at the same time because the crops attracted the animals
- hunting pressure could be reduced, and demand for extra meat focussed upon increasing
the domesticated stock rather than killing off the wild. Domestication of sheep is thought to
have first occurred in Mesopotamia around 9,000 BC, while domesticated cattle appear first
in southeast Europe three millennia later. Darwin thought that the domestic pig probably first
emerged in China, and there is uncertain evidence of its presence there around 8,000 BC.
2
There are a few elementary ecological facts which explain why cows and pigs have since
followed different patterns of domestication, and why pig culture can be viewed as 'Eastern'
while cow culture is more 'Western'.
