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antelope that migrated north in spring and south in fall and gave them a relatively predictable food supply. Then, about fifteen thousand years ago,global warming really took hold as the Ice Age loosened its grip. The climate became warmer and somewhat wetter. What had been semiarid scrubland now supported large tracts of oak, olive, and pistachio trees. Lush meadows nurtured dense stands of wild barley and wheat. So rich were the nut harvests, and so abundant were migrating gazelle, that many peoples settled in much larger communities of several hundred people, which they occupied year round for generations. This was a very different way of life from the existence of their highly mobile ancestors, but like that of their predecessors, it was a life brilliantly calibrated to the realities of their environment.
    Between about 14,500 and 13,000 years ago, generations of hunters and foragers lived so well that they founded much larger settlements. They began to bury their dead in cemeteries. The deceased wore seashells and other exotic ornaments that may have reflected more elaborate social organization, as well as a profound reverence for ancestors, those who had occupied the same territory in earlier generations. The warmth and increased rainfall did not last long. About thirteen thousand years ago, a thirteen-hundred-year-long cold drought cycle parched Southwest Asia, known to climatologists as the Younger Dryas, named after an alpine tundra flower. Colder and drier conditions rippled across once well-watered, food-rich landscapes. Many groups responded to greater aridity and nut harvest shortfalls by abandoning permanent settlements and resuming mobile lifeways. The persistent droughts forced people to adapt to a world of more finite food supplies scattered over the landscape in irregular patches. Forests retreated in the face of aridity; wild grass harvests plummeted. Gazelle hunting and more intensive processing of grains and legumes kept society going. Grinding stones for processing plant foods now abounded. These were the centuries when communities across this region of diverse landscapes started cultivating wild grasses in a deliberate attempt to extend their range. They also turned to familiar gregarious ungulates, which relied, just as people did, on predictable water supplies. Again, close juxtaposition of animals to humans became more prevalent. This time the outcome was not companionship, but full domestication of some of the most commonplace of today’s farm animals: pigs, goats, and sheep.
    Hunters became farmers—no longer on the move, but anchored to fields, flocks, herds, and grazing ranges. The needs of animals transformed the familiar tenor of daily life. Human societies were never the same again. Climate change and drought were not, of course, the only factors behind what has been called the Agricultural Revolution, but they were powerful catalysts for a world in which animals ultimately transformed human society beyond recognition, made cities and civilizations possible, and helped create a global world. Permanent settlement, ownership of herds and individual animals, inheritance, and control of grazing ranges—all these were imperatives, partially imposed by the needs of animal management, that helped change the course of history.
    Domesticated Pigs or Merely Managed Ones?
    Some twelve thousand years ago, the settlement known to archaeologists as Hallan Çemi lay in the oak-forested eastern foothills of the Taurus Mountains. 1 Here, the people relied not on wild cereals, but on nut harvests, forest game, and on the ubiquitous gazelle. They hunted both wild goats and sheep, killing mainly older beasts, as one might expect when stalking game among trees. But perhaps their most important quarry was the pig.
Sus scrofa
is a forest animal, adapted to hilly terrain covered with mature trees. Swine feed off leaves and branches, plow and tunnel in the soil, and consume the undergrowth. The hunters