The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan Read Free Book Online

were jumpers. They also had a profound fear of all predators, including humans. We can be certain, however, that the hunters captured young fawns. None other than the famed African explorerSir Richard Burton observed of the Bedouin that they “so succeed in taming the young things that they will follow their owner like dogs, and amuse themselves by hopping on his shoulders.” 8 Such casual pet keeping was very different from maintaining significant numbers of adult animals in captivity and breeding them, which was much easier with goats and sheep.
    Sheep, Goats, and Survivor Curves
    The deliberate corralling of young goats and sheep must have occurred in many places. We can only imagine what happened. At first the captures may have been casual, perhaps like those of young gazelle. But in the case of the bezoar and mouflon, cherishing a few newborns or abandoned young ones gradually turned into something quite different, once it became clear that these relatively docile and quite intelligent beasts flourished in captivity. Now the hunters separated young beasts from flocks and herds, selecting them carefully for their docility and daily behavior. Capturing such beasts would have been relatively simple, given the ease with which humans and wild caprines interacted on a regular basis.
    Once the animals were penned, the ingredients of a founder herd were in place, probably within a relatively short time. Its members lived under very different conditions than those of the wild. Now the physical contact with humans was constant and intimate, the incentives for trust and mutual understanding greatly enhanced. Their new masters and mistresses controlled the animals’ every movement in situations where their charges were already accustomed to hierarchy and leadership in the wild. The animals enjoyed immediate benefits: greater protection from predators, shelter from cold and heat when needed, and much better access to grazing grounds and very different foods. There were now immediate shifts in selection pressures from those in the wild.
    Generations of researchers have excavated farming villages and early towns from Turkey and across Southwest Asia to the Nile Valley, yet we still know frustratingly little about the changing relationship between animals and humans after domestication. A palimpsest ofarchaeological sites, fragmentary animal bones, and what zooarchaeologists call “survivorship curves” tells an incomplete story (see sidebar “Studying Survivorship Curves”). Such research attacks fundamental questions. What were the goals of herd management in the early millennia of goat and sheep domestication? Were animals kept for meat, which would have meant that most young surplus males were slaughtered when they reached an optimum weight? Alternatively, did the herders manage their animals for their wool or hair? Under these circumstances, male and female adults would have been culled, both being productive in management terms. But if the herders were after milk, most males would have been slaughtered at a very young age, to maximize the amount of milk available for human consumption. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to establish dairying practices from animal bones.
    Studying Survivorship Curves
    Can you tell a bison from a musk ox, an African eland from an impala, or—and this is where it gets really challenging—a wild goat or sheep from a domesticated one? Zooarchaeologists, the specialists who study animal bones from archaeological sites, find this hard enough with complete body parts. But when the people who butchered the animals in the first place literally cut the skeletons into ribbons for flesh, marrow, sinews, and so on, the task becomes even harder. Fortunately, distinctive body parts such as skulls, jaws, and the articular end of limb bones make most identifications relatively straightforward as far as wild animals and fully domesticated beasts are concerned. The shadowy