From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology
Subject: [ARCH] Re: Which Came First, Agriculture or Pastorial
Distribution: world
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 92 00:02:49 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1gsmvuINNa62@uwm.edu> dcleek@csd4.csd.uwm.edu writes:

 > I thought economic explanations for animal domestication
 > failed because the economic products aren't really available
 > until well after domestication has occurred. My recollection
 > is that wild sheep die if sheared. The thought of milking a
 > 300 pound wild cow is scary.
 >
 > The pet theory might explain a few animals, but not large numbers
 > of animals that would have to be fed by a hunting and gathering
 > society.

No direct criticism, but the feel of your discussion indicates some
distance between yourselves and your subject matter. Up close, one
finds no sharp distinction between "wild" and "domestic" animals as
people inevitably have in place a comprehensive and sophisticated
local resource management strategy anyway.

Given sustainable herds of sheep and cattle (or mobs of kangaroos and
emus) people would hardly bother to either shear *or* milk them, but
simply herd them into a trap or enclosure then run up and put a spear
through them, yes?

Believe me, it is very much easier to clip wool from a skin, and who
drinks milk anyway? My wife is Chinese, and had never even tasted milk
or cheese until I introduced them to her at nearly thirty years of age
here in Australia. But on the Pearl Delta food production is concerned
very much with growing rice, vegetables, chickens and pigs, along with
an appropriate array of spices, herbs and medicines, while beasts are
used for work.

Aboriginal people here certainly never drank milk, and even when the
settlers brought their cattle they treated them as they would any other
game; that is, by running alongside the beast and putting a spear into
it. In more recent times they loved using a 10-shot .22 pea rifle, and
I have seen the hunting parties run alongside a beast in relays to pump
lead into the poor thing until it just dropped finally.

 > Religion seems the best answer. Keep animals around to propitiate
 > the gods by sacrificing them. After 500 years of human contact
 > you have domesticates rather than tame, wild animals. Deleterious
 > traits, intractableness, etc. have been bred out of the herd, flock
 > because the nasty ones get sacrificed first.
 >  
 > Or so I was taught as a freshman.

Religion here is no answer except perhaps as frequently to provide a
basket for issues yet to be addressed, unless of course you refer to an
empty grumbling belly as the angriest and most demanding of Gods. The
facts are that children keep baby animals of any species they happen
upon as play things, usually the young of those killed by their parents
for food.

The lot of such "pets" is *not* a happy one . . .

--
Gil Hardwick                          Internet:  gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                  Fidonet:  3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                         Voice:  (+61 9) 399 2401
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Newsgroups: sci.anthropology