And yet in the picture we see only the final result of thousands and thousands of years of the work of civilization, the enormous importance of which simply escapes our notice because it is by everyday wonders that our amazement is least excited."[1]
The most of this work of inducing the animals of the fields and the woods to become as it were members or dependents of the human family, to enter into a league of friendship with man and to become his helpers, was done by prehistoric man. When man appears in history, he appears surrounded by almost all the domestic animals known to us to-day. The horse was already his willing servant; the dog was his faithful companion; the sheep, the cow, and the goat shared his shelter with him.
The domestication of animals had such a profound effect upon human life and occupation that it marks the opening of a new epoch in history. The hunter became a shepherd, and the hunting stage in culture gave place to the pastoral.[2]
10. The Domestication of Plants.—Long before the dawn of history those peoples of the Old World who were to play great parts in early historic times had advanced from the pastoral to the agricultural stage of culture. Just as the step from the hunting to the pastoral stage had been taken with the aid of a few of the most social species of animals, so had this second upward step from the pastoral to the agricultural stage been taken by means of the domestication of a few of the innumerable species of the seed grasses and plants growing wild in field and wood.
Wheat and barley, two of the most important of the cereals, were probably first domesticated on the plains of Babylonia and from there carried over Asia and Europe. These grains, together with oats and rice, have been, in the words of Tylor, "the mainstay of human life and the great moving power of civilization." They constituted the basis of the earliest great states and civilizations of Asia and Europe.
- ↑ Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples (London, 1890), p. 259.
- ↑ It is of interest to know that most of the wild stocks whence have come our domestic animals are of Old World origin. It is thought by some that one reason why the tribes of the New World at the time of its discovery were so far behind the peoples of the Old was that there were fewer tamable animals here.
