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11 - Out of the Fertile Crescent: The dispersal of domestic livestock through Europe and Africa
- from IV - Complexity: Species Movements in the Holocene
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- By Melinda A. Zeder, University of California Press
- Edited by Nicole Boivin, Rémy Crassard, Michael Petraglia
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- Book:
- Human Dispersal and Species Movement
- Published online:
- 04 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 27 May 2017, pp 261-303
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Summary
Abstract
This chapter tracks the dispersal of domestic sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle, from the Fertile Crescent to their points of furthest dispersal in northern Europe and southern Africa. It brings together archaeological and genetic data to illuminate the biological, geographic, and broadly cultural factors that shaped their journeys. Although considered part of a ‘Neolithic package’, these species did not always travel together. Their individual trajectories were moulded both by biological constraints and by the cultural and economic features of their human partners. Mechanisms of dispersal varied. Demic movement and replacement of indigenous foraging strategies was the primary driver of their journeys through Europe, while exchange and incorporation into local economies was more prominent in Africa – though important exceptions in both continents underscore the complexity of the process. Independent domestication outside of the Near East played only a limited role, with the one exception being the introgression of European wild boar into imported stock of Near Eastern swine, and their eventual dominance in the heritage of domestic pigs across both Europe and the Near East.
Keywords: Domestic livestock, demic diffusion, indigenous incorporation, Europe, Africa
INTRODUCTION
The emergence and spread of domesticates and the agricultural economies based upon them had the greatest transformative impact of any mass species movement in human history and, perhaps, in the history of the planet. Domestication created new varieties of plants and animals that, under the protection of humans, could be grown in almost all environments around the world (see also chapters in this volume by Fuller and Lucas, Denham, Larson, and Smith). The impacts of the development of agricultural economies based on domesticates are profound. Agriculture is a principal factor in the loss of global biodiversity, in the transformation of Earth's landforms, and in the alteration of its atmosphere. It fuelled a population explosion of agro-pastoralists and has been a cornerstone of increasingly complex societies around the world. If we are entering a new epoch of the Anthropocene in which humans have become the main drivers of Earth's systems, the origin and global spread of domesticates and agricultural economies surely played major roles in ushering in this brave new world (Smith and Zeder 2013).
Comment on Sterelny and Watkins
- Melinda A. Zeder
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- Journal:
- Cambridge Archaeological Journal / Volume 25 / Issue 3 / August 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 August 2015, pp. 698-700
- Print publication:
- August 2015
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Grand Challenges for Archaeology
- Keith W. Kintigh, Jeffrey H. Altschul, Mary C. Beaudry, Robert D. Drennan, Ann P. Kinzig, Timothy A. Kohler, W. Fredrick Limp, Herbert D. G. Maschner, William K. Michener, Timothy R. Pauketat, Peter Peregrine, Jeremy A. Sabloff, Tony J. Wilkinson, Henry T. Wright, Melinda A. Zeder
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- Journal:
- American Antiquity / Volume 79 / Issue 1 / January 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 20 January 2017, pp. 5-24
- Print publication:
- January 2014
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This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.
9 - Pathways to Animal Domestication
- Edited by Paul Gepts, University of California, Davis, Thomas R. Famula, University of California, Davis, Robert L. Bettinger, University of California, Davis, Stephen B. Brush, University of California, Davis, Ardeshir B. Damania, University of California, Davis, Patrick E. McGuire, University of California, Davis, Calvin O. Qualset, University of California, Davis
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- Book:
- Biodiversity in Agriculture
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 23 February 2012, pp 227-259
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Summary
Jack Harlan was a polymath. His life-long study of crop evolution combined plant sciences, archaeology, systematics, genetics, and conservation, leaving a legacy of five decades of influential publications that explored all aspects of crop plants – their origins, their dispersal, and their continued and future role in supporting the Earth's burgeoning populations. To Harlan, agriculture was not an invention or the product of a single big idea. Instead, he saw agricultural origins in terms of a long co-evolutionary process involving humans and plants that grew out of “many independent tentatives in many locations that fused over time to produce effective food production systems” (Harlan 1995). Harlan's remarkable body of published work contains only one short encyclopedia entry on the subject of animal domestication (Harlan 1994). He was, in fact, somewhat dismissive of the contribution of animal domesticates to humankind's food supply stating that “(a)nimals are not essential, plants supply over 90% of the food consumed by humans” (Harlan 1995). Jack Harlan would likely agree, however, that understanding livestock evolution requires the same breadth of focus that he brought to the study of crop evolution. Here I follow Harlan's example in a consideration of domestic animals, bringing together information from animal sciences, genetics, and archaeology to explore the multiple pathways leading to animal domestication and the implications of these pathways for current and future relationships between humans and their animal partners.
Domestication as a process
All considerations of domestication, whether focusing on crops or livestock, acknowledge that it involves a two-way relationship between humans and target plant or animal populations. There is less unanimity in different conceptual approaches to domestication on whether emphasis should be placed on the human or the plant/animal side of the equation (see Zeder 2006a). Some cast humans as the dominant partner in a relationship in which humans consciously and with deliberate intent assume “mastery” over all aspects of the production, movement, feeding, and protection of the domesticate (Hale 1969, Ducos 1978, Bökönyi 1989, Clutton-Brock 1994). Others see domestication as a form of biological mutualism in which both partners (humans and domesticate) reap benefits (O'Connor 1997). Some even contend that domesticates manipulated unwitting humans into relationships that gave the domesticate great evolutionary advantage at the expense of human fitness (Rindos 1984, Budiansky 1992, Morey 1994).