The Intimate Bond

by Brian Fagan

  Social Instruments

  Both sheep and goats were workaday animals. They provided meat, milk, skins, and wool or hair, plus tallow and other by-products. They were a reliable source of flesh, far more predictable than game, even if hunting continued to be part of the subsistence equation for thousands of years. Surplus males culled from the flock or herd provided a steady meat supply and also important social benefits in farming societies that, in their attitude toward animals, were totally different from hunting peoples. For the first time, people owned beasts other than dogs—not just a single animal, but males and females. These both formed breeding populations that maintained the herd and were also a vital source of social currency: surplus males.

  Judging from modern subsistence societies, individual ownership of animals by family and kin transformed society in fundamental ways from the beginning. Those who owned animals possessed assets that passed from one generation to the next. At the same time, the size of a herd became a token of wealth, and often social standing, within a kin group or a settlement. A flock owner might know his animals individually and watch them closely at lambing time, but in the final analysis, the members of his flock were powerful social instruments. Within a very short time, the surplus males from a founder flock assumed important symbolism, especially as gifts, whether given alive or slaughtered for a communal feast. Owners with proliferating flocks or herds acquired social standing and prestige, as animals became wealth on the hoof.

  At issue here were wealth and the delicate matter of the inheritance of animals and the pastures upon which they grazed. Unlike a hunter’s prey, animals were now tangible property and wealth, as were dwellings and grazing grounds, which had to pass from one generation to the next. Property and rights to land passed through the father or mother’s side, following what had to become well-established rules that affected both social and economic status. Land ownership and grazing rights were surely carefully guarded from the beginning, especially among people who knew from hard experience just how devastating voracious small stock could be on the surrounding landscape.

  Kin ties had always been important in Ice Age hunting societies. Links between widely separated bands were of paramount importance for survival. Kin could take refuge with other groups after hunting accidents and could make use of another group’s territories. But the dynamics changed profoundly with the domestication of animals, for, like cereal cultivators, each community was tied to its land, usually owned by kin groups. Cultural practices were often similar among farmers and herders. Many ancient farming communities possessed farm animals, for full-time herders are, and probably were, rare and almost invariably obtain some grain or grow it to survive in lean times. With both farmers and herders, farming and grazing tracts passed from one generation to the next down through a continuous sequence of descendants whose line of ancestors reached back far into the past. New rules for human existence accompanied the process of adapting to animal domestication, rules that defined the nature of inheritance and drastically enhanced the importance of marriage ties between different families and fellow kin in ways unimaginable among hunting groups.

  Marriages and inheritance, whether through the male or female line, became serious business, cemented by careful negotiation and by the exchange of gifts, notably of livestock—bride price. This is where surplus males came in: as gifts to a new couple starting their own flock, as ritual offerings to be sacrificed during marriage ceremonies, or to honor important guests. Deep ties of sharing and mutual obligation were a necessity in all farming societies, especially those with animals, whose welfare often depended on people spreading their beasts widely over the landscape to avoid epidemics, drought, or even human raiders. Now, for the first time, animals became individual property—something to be cherished, valued, and counted—to be given as calculated gifts, not necessarily as currency in the sense we would use the word today, but as part of the equation of survival and wealth accumulation that became central to human life in ways unimaginable among hunters and foragers.

  Sheep and goats were never prestigious animals, but their ties to the land, like those of farmers, formed another type of partnership, in which one side provided protection and food, and the other provided its meat and social leverage. Both sides were members of farming societies with deep ties to the landscape, to the spiritual realm of the ancestors. A striking example of this partnership comes from twentieth-century New Guinea.

  And Then There Were Cats

  Cats were domesticated at least ninety-five hundred years ago, probably from Felis sylvestris lybica, the wildcat of western Asia. How domestication occurred is, as always, a mystery, but it may have resulted from wildcats hunting mice and rats feeding on stored grain. The oldest known example is a large eight-month-old cat that lay alongside a deceased man in a grave dating to about 7500 BCE, from a large farming village at Shillourokambos, near Limassol on southern Cyprus.5

  Unlike other early domesticated animals, independent-minded cats are not highly social. Their relationship with people is more commensal (sometimes commensual) than anything else, but their body shape, especially while kittens, appeals to the nurturing instincts of humans. (A commensal relationship is one where one species benefits, while the other is unaffected.) Cats were known as early as 3700 BCE in Egypt, where they became household pets valued for their successful hunting of both rodents and snakes and were sometimes buried carefully.6 They were known as miu or miut (“he or she who mews”). By the New Kingdom (1530–1070 BCE), they appear in tomb paintings hunting with their masters, retrieving bird and fish, or sitting by their mistresses’ chairs.

  Cats had powerful supernatural associations in Egypt. The cat goddess Bastet protected pregnant women and was patroness of dance and music. She was believed to protect people from disease and demons. Bastet was the personification of the warming rays of the sun, usually depicted as a woman with a cat’s head, holding the ankh, a type of cross symbolizing life. Her cult center and temple center were at Bubastis, in the Nile Delta. Many dead pets were mummified and buried, sometimes in a huge Bubastis catacomb, and elsewhere. A tomb discovered at Beni Hasan, in central Egypt, in 1888, contained an estimated eighty thousand cat burials. The Greek historian Diodorus noted in the first century BCE that deceased cats were “treated with cedar oil and such spices as have the quality of imparting a pleasant odour and of preserving the body for a long time.”7 To kill a cat meant a sentence of death, as one unfortunate Roman, who killed one by accident, discovered in 47 BCE, when he was stoned to death.

  The Romans also revered cats, sometimes considering them household gods; indeed, they were the only animals allowed into temples. Romans respected them as rodent hunters and also considered them symbols of liberty. Roman armies carried cats with them through Gaul and eventually to Britain, to protect their grain supplies. Today, Rome is home to at least three hundred thousand feral cats, which live in the city’s monuments and were granted protection as part of Rome’s “bioheritage” in 2001.

  Pigs and Ancestors

  No one knows when people in New Guinea acquired pigs, but they are now a fundamental prop of local traditional societies and a classic example of how animals loom large in human existence.8 Some seven thousand Maring-speaking farmers live in the New Guinea Highlands. Back in the 1960s, anthropologist Roy Rappaport lived among the Tsembaga group, whose lives were dominated by ancestor worship, warfare, and pig keeping. They formed part of a tapestry of allies and adversaries, their lives governed by the supernatural forces of their ancestors. Without the ancestors’ assistance, there would be no success in pig raising and other aspects of daily life. Tsembaga life, and that of their neighbors, revolved around an unfolding cycle of warfare and a ritual observance known as a kaiko, which culminated in a huge pig feast.

  Once a kaiko ends, with its gargantuan pig feed, there are few male beasts left. Warfare ceases. The living now direct their thoughts toward raising pigs. A rumbim shrub is planted, and grows until there is a renewed ab
undance of animals, at which point it is uprooted and the cycle begins anew. Kaikos occur about every twelve years, but the Tsembaga have no way of measuring time, so the timing of kaikos depends on social factors. The women grow yams, taro, and sweet potatoes, and also raise the pigs. Once weaned, piglets are trained to walk behind humans like dogs. At four or five months, they are released into the forest to scrounge for themselves until called home to be fed a daily ration of substandard yams and sweet potatoes. As the pigs mature and their numbers increase, the women have to work harder and harder to feed them. They have to enlarge their gardens to raise more pigs as soon as possible so that the group can hold a kaiko before their enemies do. When Rappaport observed a kaiko in 1963, the more ambitious Tsembaga women were taking care of about six 61-kilogram (135-pound) pigs each, a demanding job over and above childrearing and other household tasks. Social tensions rose as the women cleared new gardens and hungry pigs ravaged even the fenced, cultivated land. Eventually the women’s complaints bore fruit. The men felled the rumbim shrub, and the moment for a kaiko arrived.

  The price in pigs was enormous. Rappaport’s 1963 kaiko, with its repeated feasts, had the Tsembaga killing off three-quarters of their pigs by number and seven-eighths by weight. Much of the meat went to allies and in-laws. At the climactic rituals in November 1963, ninety-six pigs were slaughtered, their meat and fat distributed to about two or three thousand people. The Tsembaga themselves ate about 5.5 kilograms (12 pounds) of meat and fat per person over five days of unconstrained gluttony.

  All this slaughter and preoccupation with pigs, as well as the elaborate costumes, dances, and rituals, fulfilled practical needs. Kaikos satisfied the Tsembaga’s craving for pork, something that is normally rare in their diet. Their environment, with its humidity and damp shade, is ideal for raising pigs, which obtain much of their food by free-ranging. However, too many pigs overburden the women and endanger the Maring gardens. This is when the kaiko comes into play, as the ancestors ensure that pigs do not destroy the women or their gardens. A kaiko keeps the ancestors happy and helps keep the pig population under control. No one can set formal limits, for circumstances change radically from year to year, depending on the size of the local population, the fortunes of individual clans, the intentions of enemies nearby, and the amount of secondary forest available for expansion. The Tsembaga and their neighbors are all engaged in a struggle to validate their varying claims to the earth’s resources. Warfare and the mere threat of it validates these claims, giving the ancestors an insatiable pig craving. At the same time, by banking large quantities of nutritionally valuable pig flesh, the Maring can attract and reward allies in times of imminent war. As a kaiko unfolds, allies and enemies alike can assess the strength of their and their hosts’ ability to defend territory. The entire system affects distribution of plants, animals, and people over a large area of the New Guinea Highlands. The Tsembaga pigs truly serve as a social lubricant.

  To own and manage a flock or herd, however small, as an ancient subsistence farmer or herder, changed one’s life dramatically—and one’s relationship with animals. Even goats, sheep, and swine were far more than just flesh and hides. As sources of wealth and social obligation, they shaped human society in new ways. And as we will see with cattle, once herding began, humanity was never the same again.

  CHAPTER 6

  Corralling the Aurochs

  Aurochs cavort on the walls of Lascaux Cave in southwestern France—black, drawn in outline, always with menacing, lyrelike horns. Seventeen thousand years ago, these great wild oxen would have flickered and moved in the soft light of fat lamps, symbols of primordial power and the challenges of the hunt. Wild bulls were dangerous prey, the stuff of hunting legend and mythic tales, nimble adversaries capable of killing a hunter with a quick flick of a horn.

  The aurochs (Bos primigenius) was one of the largest European herbivores to survive the Ice Age. Some weighed in at around 700 kilograms (1,550 pounds). With their massive, forward-facing horns; large, elongated heads; and quite long, slender legs, these were athletic, fast-moving beasts when aroused. At least three subspecies flourished in India, Europe and Eurasia, and North Africa. All are now extinct, the last European aurochs dying of natural causes in Poland in 1627. Efforts to recreate Bos primigenius have produced animals closely resembling them, but complete success still eludes the experts. Once encountered, the aurochs were rarely forgotten. Roman general Julius Caesar encountered them during his campaigns in Gaul. He described them as “a little below the elephant in size. Their strength and speed is extraordinary; they spare neither man nor beast.” He added, “Not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed.”1

  Caesar was wrong. Some eight thousand years before his time, farmers in South and Southwest Asia tamed the wild ox almost as early as goats and sheep. The historical consequences were momentous. Bulls rapidly became symbols of leadership, cattle a desirable form of wealth. They plowed fields and intensified agricultural production, helped cities and civilizations come into being. Oxen hauled plows in Mesopotamia as early as the sixth millennium BCE. They gradually replaced the backbreaking digging sticks and hoes used by earlier farmers and increased agricultural productivity significantly.

  Domesticating a larger animal such as an aurochs would have been much harder than taming smaller farm animals. Just its size and unpredictable ferocity would seem insurmountable obstacles. Apparently, however, a small number of people in both Southwest Asia and South Asia succeeded in managing and taming a few large, aggressive, and by nature territorial beasts as a more reliable food source than game. And, in time, they apparently learned how to milk the cows. Just corralling a few aurochs would have been a major challenge. Perhaps neighboring villages exchanged information, and even partially tamed beasts. We will never know. It’s certain, however, that such animals would have had important symbolic value in societies where hunting fierce beasts and carnivores was a central part of cultural ideology. Today, cattle are the most important domesticated animals in the world, 1.3 billion of them cows. They provide dairy products, leather, meat, and manure for fertilizer. We couldn’t live life as we know it today without them.

  An Excursion into Cattle Handling

  How did people tame such a seemingly formidable beast? As with smaller farm animals, here we enter the realm of intelligent guesswork, for we will, of course, never know the details. However, we can glean some clues from modern studies of cattle behavior and stock management procedures. The animal scientist Temple Grandin points out that cattle are always alert for predators.2 Their brains operate like sentries against sudden movement. When threatened, they bunch together and seek safety in numbers, or they turn and fight with their horns. Many people who are unfamiliar with farms don’t realize that most beef cattle aren’t tame. They offer a contrast with pet cows and working oxen, and with dairy cows that are milked two or three times a day. Such animals enjoy a close association with people and have fewer fear genes. For instance, the well-known Holstein dairy cow is almost certainly genetically farther away from her wild ancestors than other domesticated cattle, as she has been selected for milk production. On large ranches, beef cattle are habituated to the sight of people, but again, they are not fully tame. Grandin writes of “flight zones,” the distances that wild animals will allow you to approach before they flee. Domesticated cows have a small-to-zero flight zone compared with range beef cattle.

  A great deal depends on how people handle cattle. Yelling, someone or something’s sudden appearance, or fast-moving objects, such as a galloping horse, cause fear to kick in. The beasts’ nervous systems are attuned to detect predators and threats, as they are prime targets in the wild. All cattle are afraid of heights and sudden movement. They learn fear from one another. As a friend of Grandin’s aptly expressed it, they are “curiously afraid” when confronted with something unfamiliar. The curiosity and uncertainty cause mild anxiety and vigilance. They want to investigate something new but are afra
id of the possible outcomes. Forced novelty just doesn’t work.

  Cattle are likely to be upset when they have to be moved. Tame cattle will follow buckets of grain. They will even move into new pastures by truck if they know there is food at the end of the trip. They are familiar with the handling procedures. Herding cattle over longer distances is much harder, especially on an open range, where there are no intensively managed pastures. The most successful moves are those that cause as little fear in the animals as possible. The old stereotypical cowhand drives in Westerns, with shouting and whistling cowboys and galloping steeds, are dead wrong, for such behavior causes cattle to run and panic. The most effective way to move cattle over longer distances is by pressuring their flight zones with gentle movements, where you back off when they move in the right direction. Once the cattle bunch instead of scattering, they can be quietly moved as a herd. Their loosely arranged formation coincides with your giving them more protection as they graze. This is common behavior with other animals, such as antelope. In wide-open spaces like the Serengeti Plains in East Africa, for instance, antelope feed calmly even when a pride of lions is nearby. When the lions stalk them, they know it. Bos primigenius had similar hardwired predefense behaviors. By using gentle herding methods, the modern-day cattle herder invokes these behaviors. Once the cattle are bunched, he or she can move deeper into the flight zone and move them along, using their natural defense instincts. This is not true of dairy cows, which are used to being led toward pasture or a corral.

  Cattle handling probably reached its greatest skill level during the nineteenth century CE, when cowboys drove thousands of head of cattle over enormous distances of the American West between 1866 and 1886. Twenty million cattle traveled from Texas to railheads in Kansas such as Abilene, for shipment to stockyards in Chicago and points farther east. The cowboys moved the cattle slowly and quietly, for they knew that stress from rough handling would kill hundreds of animals along the way. On average, a Texas-to-Kansas drive numbered about three thousand head, with at least ten cowboys driving and watching the cattle day and night, moving them about twenty-four kilometers (fifteen miles) a day. It could take as long as two months to complete a drive. Not that such drives were unique to the American West. In medieval Europe, Hungarian Grey cattle traveled across the Danube to the beef markets of western Europe. The Swiss drove cattle across the Alps and into Italy, until sedentary dairy farming became more profitable. In the American West, the expansion of railroads throughout the country (also chronic overgrazing) tolled the death knell for much long-distance driving. All kinds of other research has relevance to early cattle herding. For instance, cattle herds should be larger than four head, for larger groups are more peaceful, housed as they are in bigger pens, which allows attacked animals to move away. It’s important, too, to keep cattle together with beasts they know, as a way of reducing aggressive behavior.