Thursday, September 24, 2015

According to Guns, Germs, and Steel what happened first: domestication of plants or domestication of mammals?

According to Diamond, people domesticated plants before
they domesticated mammals.


One way to see this is to look
at Tables 9.3 and 5.1.  These give the dates for earliest attested dates of
domestication.  Table 5.1 tells us that domestication occurred in Southwest Asia by 8500
BC.  Meanwhile, Table 9.3 tells us that sheep and goats were first domesticated in 8000
BC.  This shows that the plants must have been domesticated
first.


However, the domestication of animals did help to
improve the cultivation of domesticated plants.  Diamond tells us in Chapter 4 that the
domestication of large animals helped to increase crop production because of such things
as animals' ability to pull plows and their production of manure that could be used as
fertilizer.


Diamond tells us, then, that plants were
domesticated first, but that the domestication of animals also helped to make plant
domestication more economically productive.

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