by Brian Fagan
Much of the behavior of range cattle during the nineteenth century and, for that matter, today seems to mirror what we know about the habits of Bos primigenius. A placid beast when calm, it can display aggressive and violent behavior with sudden movement or an unexpected noise. Hunting such a formidable, easily angered quarry required consummate stalking skills. However, if African game or range cattle are any guide, people moving quietly within clear sight of an aurochs might well have triggered no emotional reaction from a grazing wild ox whatsoever. I’ve walked quietly among herds of antelope with no obvious threatening intent. They merely looked up, and then went on grazing. But if I’d suddenly appeared from among the trees or high grass, they would have bolted at once, feeling threatened. This is very different behavior from that of a beast that is aware it’s being stalked and then attacked. And this may be a clue as to how cattle were first tamed.
Hunters survive and are successful in the hunt because they know their quarry at close quarters, at every season, at night and by day, at first light and dusk. They’ve learned when not to approach them, and how to allay their fears; they’ve watched how wild oxen protect their young. One can imagine a hunting group living in close juxtaposition to a small aurochs herd, even walking around them in the open with no plan for a kill. Perhaps a young calf or a juvenile bull became separated from the herd. The hunters, who probably knew different beasts individually, would gently herd the stray into a large enclosure, and then make sure it had fodder and water. And so the slow process would unfold until a few captive animals became habituated to humans and bred within their corral, or grazed nearby and were corralled at night. The hunters, now herders, would protect their charges against predators. The process must have taken years before the lumbering animals became accustomed to captivity and management, or to being milked. Regular milking must have developed a close bond between tamer and tamed, which may account for the intimate relationships that subsequently developed between cattle and their owners in many pastoral societies.
Exploitation, breeding, and nurturing—these practices resonate in modern experience with animal husbandry, which began during the eighteenth century (see chapter 15). Early cattle herders were concerned above all with acquiring docile beasts that were easily managed. They must have soon learned that castrating surplus males produced more manageable beasts. This also allowed a herder to choose which animals to breed. Within a relatively short time, domesticated cattle were smaller, almost juvenile (a condition known as neoteny), more docile, and less wary around humans.
Wild cattle may have been dangerous prey, but they offered important advantages to those who tamed them. Nutritionally, they are highly desirable, supplying 2,360 calories per kilogram. Almost certainly they were tamed initially not for their milk, but for their meat. As societies in Southwest Asia turned to cultivation, their predominantly carbohydrate-laden diet created both long-term health problems such as osteoporosis, and needs for protein to compensate for cereal-based diets. In the final analysis, it was easier to protect, breed, and cull herds than to hunt reliably—and we humans develop attachments to large mammals and their young. Domestication was a symbiotic process to which both animals and humans contributed.
Domesticating Bos
Now let’s look at the archaeological data. Most authorities believe that Bos primigenius was domesticated at least twice, perhaps three times. The Cro-Magnons of Europe never tamed Primigenius, which was first tamed in more arid, less-forested environments. There, perhaps, the beasts were easier to approach when they could see people clearly. Humpless cattle, sometimes called taurines (Bos taurus), were first corralled in the Taurus Mountains region of what is now Turkey, the place where the greatest genetic diversity of cattle occurs. If the molecular biologists are to be believed, cattle domestication may have involved a mere eighty beasts.3 Mitochondrial DNA from ancient and modern sources tell us that only a limited number of cattle lineages was involved in a domestication process that may have taken as long as two thousand years, perhaps along the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Syria and Turkey. Dja’de and Çayönü, both villages of the ninth millennium BCE, lie less than 250 kilometers (155 miles) apart. Between 8800 and 8200 BCE, the inhabitants relied more and more on cattle at the expense of hunting. Hundreds of fragmentary bones from the two villages may document a gradual process of domestication.
Once domesticated, these cattle spread rapidly across Southwest Asia, a consequence, in part, of the need for nutritious grazing, and, perhaps, of trading. They may even have been tamed in northeastern China as early as 8700 BCE, but the evidence is not unequivocal. What is certain, however, is that cattle were in widespread use in China, Mongolia, and Korea by 3000 BCE, when the first cities and civilizations appeared in Mesopotamia and along the Nile. Domestic cattle abounded in the Nile Valley well before founding of Egyptian civilization in 3100 BCE and are known from sites occupied at least two thousand years earlier. Farmers brought cattle and other farm animals with them as they spread across Europe in about 5500 BCE. The humped zebu (Bos indicus) was domesticated, most likely in the Indus River Valley of South Asia, by about 5000 BCE and spread widely into southern China and Southeast Asia.
“Goods to Think With”
By 7500 BCE, farming villages, even some small towns, flourished over a wide area of the Near East. One of the larger settlements, Çatal Höyük, on Turkey’s Anatolian Plateau, gives us a clear portrait of the increasingly sophisticated relationships between cattle and humans.4 Here, every aspect of daily life, whether secular or ritual, unfolded not in great public buildings, but in houses occupied for many generations. They were literally “history houses” that commemorated ancestors, lavishly decorated with wall paintings that displayed elaborate symbolism. There were paintings of humans. Dangerous animals and bulls were everywhere. Ox skulls modeled with plaster features adorned houses from their moment of first occupation. Bull’s horns projected from walls and benches. Plastered skulls of revered ancestors and ancestral burials lay under the floors. Çatal Höyük’s history houses were vibrant archives with a status that involved control of history, religion, and interaction with ancestors. They may also have played an important role in ceremonial feasts involving wild bulls that had mythical and spiritual associations. Ancestors, animal and human, protected the occupants of the house, part of a strong motif of continuity that permeated early farming societies throughout Southwest Asia, where farming life revolved around the endless passage of the seasons (see sidebar “Disengaging from Nature?”).
Disengaging from Nature?
Domesticating animals was most emphatically not a one-sided relationship, where people were in charge, set the conditions for taming, and then exploited their beasts. Rather, humans were participants in a broad process, part of a profound shift in the human relationship to the natural environment. Some French scholars such as Jacques Cauvin argue that farming settled people on the land and “disengaged” them from nature, making them distinctive and, as it were, on a higher plane than animals.5 Cauvin believes that a dramatic shift in human consciousness resulted.
There was a florescence of animal imagery just before farming began, which endured for some time, reflected in shrines like those of Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Höyük, with their routine depictions of foxes, vultures, and other ferocious beasts.
Göbekli Tepe, in southeastern Turkey, lies on a hill where a series of circular structures were cut into the underlying limestone in about 9600 BCE.6 They are almost cryptlike, adorned with rectangular stone pillars up to 2.4 meters (8 feet) high, bearing carvings of aurochs, gazelle, wild boar, snakes, and birds. There are no domesticated animals, just game and predators. Göbekli Tepe may have been a shrine where ancient rituals involving both predators and familiar animals unfolded for many generations, perhaps attracting visitors from communities with similar structures at least a hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) away.
The wild animals persist for a long time, including in s
cenes at another site, Nevali Çori, near the Euphrates, where a bird perches on a human head and a figure with a human head stands near a bird. Everywhere, they may be tangible symbols of rituals that connected hunters with the hunted, people with animals, just as they had done for thousands of years, and did in some regions right into modern times. Then something changed: after about 7500 BCE, only depictions of human females and bulls persist, as if these two had become part of a symbolism of life and death when humans became separated from the natural world. And from there it was a short step to feelings of dominance and superiority over nature and its beasts. There was a sharp break from the intimacy with the natural world among Ice Age hunters that coincided with the domestication of the farm animals so familiar to us today.
Cattle herding and its values permeated farming societies over a large area of Southwest Asia. The same values continued to shape the customs of these societies long after they had changed profoundly and moved away from any emphasis on herding. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked that animals, among them cattle, were goods to think with—and think their owners did. Cattle became wealth, accumulated, displayed, fought over, and sacrificed with reverence. But they were also the focus of human behaviors and values deeply embedded in animal husbandry. The herders manipulated their herds, their control helping both animals and humans to thrive. Milk and cheese, provided by cows year after year, formed a powerful bond between people and their cattle, which was expressed in a reluctance to kill animals, except in a sacrificial setting. It followed that slaughtering herds for their meat was a problem, partly because killing beasts reduced the herd, but also because of the conflict between necessity and social values.
Cattle, power, wealth—the close relationships between cattle and their herders developed in the earliest days of domestication, thanks to the close bonds developed between corralled animals and their guardians, especially with cows. From this interdependence developed distinctive social values that permeate subsistence cattle herding societies to this day. The relationships they forge with their beasts are profoundly emotional and sometimes border on obsession.
Cattle herders range their beasts over considerable distances, especially in semiarid environments where even a small amount of rainfall can make a dramatic difference to animals on the land. The number of hectares required for such grazing was enormous. One estimate has it that had not the herds of the Maasai of East Africa been decimated by an epidemic of rinderpest (cattle plague, now extinct) in the late nineteenth century, their cattle would eventually have required all of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda for their range. Such landscapes are like giant sets of lungs, sucking people in when rainfall encourages plant growth and creates standing water, pushing them out when conditions are drier. Herein lies a central dynamic of history triggered by animals—the often hostile relationship between farmers anchored to their fields and nomadic herders on the margins. In drought years, marauding nomads would drive their beasts onto better-watered farmland, seeking water and forage for them. Sumerian cities, such as Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, lived in constant fear of raiding nomads, especially in times of drought. In 2200 BCE, so many herds moved downstream that the city’s ruler built a 180-kilometer-long (112-mile) wall, named the “Repeller of Amorites,” to keep herder immigration in check. His efforts were to no avail. The population of Ur increased threefold, and the economy collapsed.7
Cultivated, settled lands symbolized order and continuity at least to their settlers, constantly under threat from those without, who possessed animals but no land. Such beliefs permeated ancient Japan, Egypt, the Greeks, and the Romans, who considered Corsican shepherds from island mountains to be brigands and savages, effectively wild beasts. As Englishman Edmund Spenser was to write in Elizabethan times, “Loke into all Countries that live in suche sorte by keeping of Cattle and you shall finde that they are bothe verie Barbarians and uncivil, allsoe greatly given to warre.”8 The fourteenth-century Islamic geographer and historian Ibn Khaldun described Arab camel herding groups as defiant of authority. “They are the most savage human beings that exist. Compared with sedentary people, they are on a level with wild untamable [animals].”9 For all these derogatory remarks, the relationships between humans and nomadic herders shaped key ideas and values that were fundamental to people in many parts of the world.
Domestication means a shift in focus from the dead animal to the living one. Unlike communally owned game, open to be killed by all, domesticated livestock is owned and maintained. Slaughtering an animal diminishes the herd, so the owner has to take into account all manner of other factors, not only costs such as food needs and herd requirements, but benefits of all kinds, such as meeting social and ritual obligations. These factors are particularly important with large, slow-reproducing animals like cattle, which are harder to replace. Without access to storage or drying facilities, one family alone cannot consume the amount of meat such animals produce, which adds another layer of complication to daily life. Modern-day anthropological studies of traditional cattle herders find that they behave toward their animals in ways that are very different from those of modern owners, concerned only with price, protein, and calories.
Managing the Herd
Hardly any twentieth-century cattle herders (pastoralists) lived entirely off their herds. They relied on cereals and even cultivated the soil themselves if they had to, which they usually considered a demeaning activity. The blood, flesh, and milk from their beasts were inadequate for true self-sufficiency. Most likely, ancient herds were small, for cattle breed more slowly than goats or sheep. This makes it harder to recover losses from slaughtering, drought, or disease. Judging from recent traditional practice, documented by anthropologists, each herder had his own management strategy, which depended to a considerable extent on the size of his or her herd and wealth. Right from the beginning, herding households would have measured their wealth and social status in head of cattle. Both small stock and grain also had value, but not as wealth in the social sense. Land was communally owned by clans or other kin units, so about the only currency was beasts. And cattle have the advantage that they are social animals that thrive in groups and can survive off natural vegetation without fodder; otherwise, the cost of raising them in corrals alone would be unsustainable. In many African societies, cattle effectively served as “money.” The same must have been true in many other ancient cattle-owning cultures.
As cattle became more important as wealth, a conflict would arise between the quest for riches and the need for subsistence. If ancient societies were like recent ones, the management strategies would have changed. Cattle became stored wealth, often exchanged for grain. In more arid environments with a high risk of drought, wealth on the hoof was never permanent riches. Owners would try to reduce risk by lending out animals, distributing them with relatives over wide areas, or loaning them to obtain goodwill and help fellow kin. Those without livestock would often have attached themselves to wealthy households in exchange for their labor and a few animals that allowed them to build up a herd. A great deal of energy and thought went into building ever-larger stocks of cattle wealth. Then there was the bride price (sometimes called bride wealth), a payment from the groom’s side to the bride’s to seal a marriage, a fundamental dynamic in many cattle-herding societies.
“The Parasite of the Cow”
Until recently, cattle-herding societies thrived in widely scattered parts of the Old World, in both Africa and Asia. Fortunately, a series of classic anthropological studies described some of these societies before population growth and industrialization encroached on their lifeways. Given the conservatism of herding societies, we can learn something from them about the realities of cattle management in the more remote past. We know, for example, that subsistence cattle herders developed extremely close relationships with their beasts, almost to the point of what we would describe as eccentricity.
Among the best-known pastoralists are the tall, long-limbed Nuer, who gra
zed their beasts in the swamps and open savanna on either side of the Nile in southern Sudan. The British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who lived among them during the 1930s, wrote that they “regard horticulture as toil forced on them by poverty of stock . . . The only labor they delight in is care of cattle.”10 Families owned cattle. Kinship formed powerful bonds, defined in part by payment of bride wealth. Evans-Pritchard defined the movement of cattle from family camp to family camp as the equivalent of lines on a genealogical chart, so carefully were such movements traced.
