Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Need to go into history to understand the cause of disease or find the cure - 1

The first farmers from 8001 BC

From watering the plants in a dry spell and from weeding around a plant, it is a small step in collecting its seeds and planting them in a protected spot where they will have better than average chances of growing.

From keeping animals in cages, to kill them when needed was a small step in keeping them until their offspring are born.

The process of cultivating crops and domesticating animals was a slow process formed at first only a small part of a community’s diet, most of it coming still from hunting and gathering.  In each place where the change happened, its pattern is no different.

The earliest place known to have lived mainly from the cultivation of crops is Jericho. By around 8000 BC this community, who were occupying a naturally well-watered region, were into growing selected forms of wheat (emmer and einkorn are the two varieties), which was soon to be followed by barley. Though no longer gatherers like before, these people turned into hunters. Their source of meat was wild gazelle, cattle, goat and boars. 

Jericho is also known as the first town, that too it was no accident, with a population of 2000 or more. A pioneering agricultural community, surrounded by various other tribes dependent mostly on gathering food, offers easy pickings which then needed vigorous protection. Jericho had protective walls and a tower. 

Sheep and goats, cattle and pigs: 9000-7000 BC

The first animals known to have been domesticated as a source of food are sheep in the Middle East.  This deducing was arrived at after see high proportion of bones of one-year-old sheep discarded in a settlement at Shanidar, in what is now called northern Iraq.   Goats soon followed thereafter, and since then these two become the standard animals of the nomadic pastoralists, a tribes which moves all year long with their flocks, guided by the availability of fresh grass. 

We also find that cattle and pigs are also associated more with settled communities, were domesticated slightly later - and it might have started probably not long after 7000 BC.  The Ox may first have been bred by humans in western Asia. The pig must have been probably first domesticated in China.