Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig Read Online Free PDF Page B

would have refused to lug to their next campsite. Technology thus reinforced the cultural transformation that initially began as a response to the changing environment.
    This village way of life spread throughout the region. The expansion was a simple matter of demographics: hunter-gatherers needed to carry not only their belongings but also their youngest children from camp to camp, which meant that they spaced offspring—perhaps through infanticide—at intervals of three or four years. Freed from this limitation, the population of settled villages exploded.
    The good times lasted a couple of thousand years. Then another cold spell arrived about 10,800 bc . Populations had boomed in warm weather, but now the wild sources of food that had sustained them disappeared.
    Faced with hunger, people realized that they didn’t have to wait for wild cereals to grow on their own: they could take the seeds they had gathered and stick them in the ground. The earliest known domesticated plant, rye, dates from 10,000 bc , in the midst of this cold snap. The newly arid climate also shrank the size of lakes and rivers, exposing thousands of acres of rich soils ready for planting.The people became farmers.
    Those of us on the far side of this shift might ask what took them so long. Anyone who’s spent time farming—let alone farming with stone tools—knows the answer: gathering food from the wild is far preferable to growing it. Farming is hardwork. It also tends to lead to social stratification, famine, and epidemic disease.That’s why one scholar has labeled agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” But the people of 10,000 bc couldn’t have predicted this. For them, farming was a matter of survival. When nature stopped providing, they provided for themselves.
    The cold spell ended about 9600 bc , and the global climate warmed again, entering a period of stability known as the holocene (which is now ending, some scientists propose, as we enter the anthropocene, an era of climate change caused by human activity). Once again, wild food flourished. People could have returned to the foraging ways of their ancestors, but they did not. Instead, they got more serious about farming. In the Near East, the period from 10,000 to 6000 bc witnessed the domestication of wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas, as well as pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle. Wheat remains one of the world’s staple grains (along with corn from the New World and rice from Asia), and the region’s domestic animals have become the primary sources of meat and dairy products all over the world.
    The success of farming in the Near East owed much to the weather. The climate was hot and dry in the summer, cool and rainy in the winter. Cereals and legumes grew in the winter and lay dormant in the soil during the hot, dry summer. That required large seeds, with a tough shell protecting a kernel of carbohydrates that served as the seed’s energy source. Those carbohydrates became food for the humans who harvested the seeds.
    Large grains were useful enough when collected from the wild, but once people started planting them, another change occurred. Wheat and other grains had evolved a seed head that shattered when ripe, scattering seeds to the ground. If the head didn’t shatter—which could happen as the result of a simplegenetic mutation—the seeds remained high above the ground, unable to germinate, directed down an evolutionary dead end. But then humans came along. On a few occasions, they would have come across a stand of wild cereal after it had ripened, and the plants with this mutation would have made up a disproportionate percentage of the harvest. People would have kept these seeds to replant, thereby perpetuating the mutations. This reversed the course of evolution: an undesirable quality in nature became indispensable to human culture. Soon humans selected for other desirable qualities in the plants, such as increased seed sizes and