Harnessing Animals: A Key Driver of Prehistoric Human Progress
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The use of animals for their renewable products greatly increased human capabilities in prehistory. Secondary products – anything that can be gleaned from a domestic animal repeatedly over its lifetime – expanded the capabilities of ancient human societies. Apart from their meat, bones and skin, animals gave ancient people vital goods such as their milk and wool. Steady supply of milk from domesticated animals more than doubled the calories in human diet. Wool harvested from sheep allowed humans to keep warm in the colder months, thereby reducing the occurrence of disease and increasing life expectancy.
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Studies of the patterns of slaughter of domestic animals according to their age and sex, combined with chemical analyses of the residues left inside ancient pottery vessels, suggest that the consumption of dairy products from sheep, goats and cattle likely dates back into the Neolithic period – at least 8,000 years ago in Europe (circa 6000 BCE) and earlier in the Near East. The origins of woolly sheep are less well-known. Wild sheep do not have woolly coats, which developed at some point following their domestication. Very few examples of preserved woollen textiles survive for millennia, so the exact date of their production from sheep remains difficult to establish. However, studies of artefacts used in the spinning and weaving of textiles suggest that wool was developed in some regions (such as the Near East) by at least 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. However, even after decades of archaeological research, exactly when humans started using domesticated animals as engines of labour is not well understood.
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In the past, investigators generally looked for evidence of items pulled – primarily (but not only) wagons and ploughs. Wagons – known from preserved images such as figurines and rock art – have existed for more than 5,000 years. Early ploughs, such as the ard or scratch plough, were made of wood, and do not preserve well over thousands of years. The oldest known evidence of ploughs in Europe comes from fragments of ards preserved in water-logged ancient sites. They are just under 6,000 years old. Though not nearly as effective as modern tools, early ploughs would have been far faster and easier than breaking compacted earth with hand tools for the purpose of planting crops. They allowed people to plant more crops using less labour and time, increasing the amount of food that could be grown each year.
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Pulling heavy loads – heavier than bodyweight – causes the medial surfaces of cattle footbones to grow larger, producing a larger surface area over which to distribute the strain. For the past 30 years, many studies have analyzed such changes to cattle footbones found in European archaeological sites dating to 6,000 years ago or later – in order to identify the nature of changes brought about in the footbones due to the animals’ being used to plough land – as the oldest known plough existed about 6000 years ago. In a recent study in the journal Antiquity, we challenged the 4th-millennium dating (6,000 years ago) of the earliest known use of cattle as traction engines in Europe. We studied the footbones of cattle from 11 sites in the western Balkans, dating to the local Neolithic and ranging from 8,000 to 6,500 years ago. Across these sites, cattle footbones from sites of human settlement were compared with the same bones from wild cattle at nearby sites, to determine the presence and absence of footbone alterations indicative of the strain of traction.
