The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan Read Free Book Online Page A

transition period between, say, wild and domesticated sheep or pigs is especially challenging, owing to the often subtle changes between wild and tamed beasts. This is without taking into account sexual dimorphism (size variations between males and females) and other such factors. The most effective way of looking at the changes in human behavior toward animals during these millennia is to create survivorship curves, using large samples of upper and lower jaws, where the teeth supply information on the age of individual animals at the time when they were killed or slaughtered.
    Teeth provide an almost continuous guide to the age of an individual animal from birth to old age. Immature teeth appear first, followed by mature ones, which erupt in sequence. For example, if a group of hunters drives a bison herd over a cliff, the result will be what zooarchaeologists call a “catastrophic age profile,” with few older individuals. An “attritional profile,” with overrepresentation of young and old beasts and few prime-age animals relative to their abundance in living populations, could result from spear hunting. Both these profiles are different from those found with a domesticated herd or flock, where the meat supply is controlled. Here you might find an abundance of prime animals with newly erupted mature teeth and fewer older animals. This reflects the reality of too many surplus males. Some may have been castrated, with most consumed for their meat and by-products; older females might have been killed when they were no longer of any use for breeding, milk, or (with males, too) draft purposes.
    The situation becomes even more complicated at the threshold of domestication, when you might find a combination of selective hunting and systematic killing of surplus domesticated males. The only way one can figure out the meaning of such profiles is by working with large samples and assessing their meaning in the context of the excavated occupations as a whole. Survivorship research, carried out on goats, sheep, and pigs, is still in its infancy, relatively speaking, but shows great promise for the future.
    Many variables act on survivorship curves, especially for subsistence herders, who rely heavily on their animal for food and raw materials, while at the same time being well aware of the risks that could decimate their herds. They tend, for example, to space out the slaughtering of rams as a hedge against food shortages. Herders have to respond to awide range of environmental, political, and social realities, which can change dramatically within a short period. For instance, just the movement of herds from summer to winter pastures can skew curves obtained from a single site. Circumstances also change dramatically when the herders are engaged in the business of supplying meat and other products to larger urban populations, which was the case in later times.
    We can track some of the changes, at least in general terms, from a series of Turkish sites that have yielded large numbers of goat and sheep bones. 9 For instance, the inhabitants of Asikli Höyük, a large village in central Turkey occupied during the second half of the eighth millennium BCE , slaughtered caprines between the ages of one to three years. There are no signs of size decrease or other telltale indications of domestication. Perhaps the animals were not under intensive human management and still associated with wild breeding populations. At contemporary Süberde, the herders killed most animals between one and three years, most of these between twenty-one and twenty-four months. Süberde’s sheep are smaller than wild sheep beasts, probably living and breeding under human management. The earliest definitive evidence for a deliberate strategy of culling young adult male sheep, especially larger rams, comes from Erbaba Höyük, northwest of Süberde, occupied during the seventh millennium BCE .
    By 6000 BCE , farmers over wide areas of