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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