The first farmers:
from 8000 BC
The first farming must
have started by accident, may be from weeding around a plant or may be perhaps
by unintentional watering of an area which were fertile for plantations and
after observing the developments after these unintentional watering in those
areas, cultivation of farming started.
It is from these that farming started catching on with earlier mankind. From penning in animals, main purpose is to
eat them, to kill them when needed, it was a small step to keeping them until
their offspring are born.
In any one place the process was a gradual but it caught on with many civilizations around the world. Cultivated crops or domesticated animals, at first formed 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, almost similar but with not so noticeable difference. But in the Middle East, in America, in China and Southeast Asia, the change did occur.
The earliest place known to have lived mainly from the cultivation of crops started spreading around the world from Jerico. By around 8000 BC this community started occupying a naturally well-watered region, is growing selected forms of wheat, soon to be followed by barley. These people are still hunters but had stopped being the gatherers for foods. Their source of meat is wild gazelle, goat, boar and cattle.
Sheep and goats, cattle and pigs: 7000-9000 BC
First animals known to have been domesticated as a source of food are sheep in the Middle East. The high proportion of bones of one-year-old sheep discarded in a settlement at Shanidar was considered as a proof of this domestication and a source of food, in what is now northern Iraq. It was soon followed by goats and these two become the standard animals of the nomadic pastoralists – tribes and they moved along with their flocks all the year, looking for fresh grass for their flocks.
Cattle and pigs are associated more with settled communities around the world and it is believed that they were domesticated slightly later but these could not have been long after 8000 BC. The ox must have been first to be bred by humans in western Asia. The pig is probably first domesticated in China.
Of the basic farm
animals, cattle represent the most significant development in village life. It was around that time that mankind realized
that cattle not only provide food to eat but also provide milk in plentiful
that is more than their off springs can consume or require and their strength
provided an unprecedented addition to man’s endeavor to do things.
