The transition from food collection to food production, which is characteristic of the Neolithic stage in human history, was the result of a fundamental advance--it might almost be said, the fundamental advance--in technology. Every other use which we have learned to make of the material universe depends upon our ability to produce food for a given population by means which do not of themselves entirely exhaust the energy and time of that population. Man as a hunter had no such surplus; it was man the keeper of flocks and herds and cultivator of the soil who first accumulated the surplus that has always been the basis of all civilization. In ancient and modern times alike, the dietary of man the producer has derived both directly from his crops and from the flesh or milk of animals to which, in most cases, he feeds a part of the crops he grows: the proportion of food taken from these two sources varies greatly both between and within different communities. Although this interaction of crops and herds dates from the Neolithic stage, it will be convenient to consider the domestication of animals first, both because it began a little earlier than agriculture, and, more important, because its main technological history was much earlier completed.

Since domestic animals are a source not merely of food but of industrial materials, means of transport, power resources, and protection for man, it is easy to exaggerate the purposefulness of early contacts. In the eyes of the primitive savage the only valuable animal was a dead one: nevertheless, the taming of some animals by man was a natural result of coexistence. There lived in the same regions of the earth as primitive man animals that were unlikely either to exterminate him or to be exterminated by him. In certain cases, notably the dog and the pig, animals had an interest in attaching themselves to primitive man as scavengers: they found a ready food supply in rejected offal and scraps from carcasses, husks, and fruit skins, and whatever was lost or discarded when man moved on. Conversely, man as a hunter might learn the usefulness of an animal through its unintentional co-operation--the pack of wild dogs driving game within reach or the hind near the camp attracting stags. As for how experiments in domestication are likely to have arisen, the dog is only one particularly good example of the many animals whose young, in the absence of their mother, are easily caught, fairly easily reared, and--to begin with at least--harmless, entertaining, and docile. In the case of the reindeer, where the distinction between wild and tame remains in modern times comparatively small, its early domestication can be attributed to yet another factor: man's natural functions made him a provider of the salt which was lacking in snow/water but available around human settlements.

Whatever tentative steps towards domestication had been taken earlier, particularly as regards the dog, which could be used in the chase, Neolithic agriculture provided the first big inducements to experiment with the taming of other animals on a larger scale. The new settled abodes of mankind made it easier to protect stock and so to derive full benefit from its multiplication. Fallow ground and stubble were good for grazing, and it was not a big step for man to take from the growing of grain for himself to the growing of easy fodder crops for his cattle. In addition to their milk and their flesh, the sheep, the goat, and the ox provided material for clothing, shelter, and containers. From the use of the dog to assist man's legs as a hunter, it was not a very big transition to the use of larger animals to save man's back as a burden-bearer. From general burden-carrying there follows both burden-pulling and the carrying of a special burden--man the rider. All these uses of the domestic animal belong to a remote antiquity; and the same is true indeed of his less work-a-day uses as an object of worship and as a pet, in both of which capacities the cat figured prominently in ancient Egypt, promoted thereto from his original task as a guardian of corn-bins. It is therefore possible to make a single general survey both of the processes of domestication and of the field of animal life which it covers.

The domestication of any particular species of animal must have begun with a phase in which the taming was so casual and partial that interbreeding with the wild form remained common. When the domestic stock became fully separated from the wild and bred within itself, its appearance underwent modification and gave rise to a distinct domestic breed. Hence the distinctive breeds of sheep, cattle, and pigs which Neolithic migrants brought with them into Europe.

Then began the still-continuing phase of conscious control of breeding in the hope, not always fulfilled, of developing the most useful characteristics: the enormous variety of dogs that has been evolved is a striking example of the results of interbreeding within a species. For a time, the object of producing more productive cattle and fiercer watchdogs may have been sought by allowing interbreeding with wild specimens; but it was soon found that dependable qualities of color and shape, strength and speed, and superior yields of milk, wool, and meat, were mainly to be achieved by the establishment of standard breeds. In the Near East this stage had already been reached 5,000 years ago, and as the differentiation from the wild species of the same animal became more marked, any interbreeding with the latter came to be regarded as a serious disadvantage. . .