Animal Domestication Research Paper

Words: 1062
Pages: 5

Domestication operated on few wild species in very few geographic areas. Plant and animal domestication provide most food today, was prerequisite to the rise of civilization, and it also transformed global demography. It eventually yielded agents of conquest; however, it arose in only a few areas of the world, and the people who first acquired domesticates gained huge advantages. The earliest centers of domestication were the Fertile Crescent and parts of China. People who lived in these centers spread their culture over much of the world. The world's primary farmers did not have a model of farming to inspect, so they could not have thought of the domestication's consequences. Otherwise, they would definitely have outlawed the first step towards …show more content…
Many of the differences between domestic plants and their wild ancestors came from the selection of wild plants which were gathered and brought back to camp from hunter-gatherers. Furthermore, animal domestication's roots involved the ubiquitous nature of people to try to tame or manage wild animals. Although the manipulation of wild plants and animals was present for a long time, the behavior of hunter-gatherers started changing at the end of the Pleistocene as a result of increasingly unpredictable climate, decreases in big-game species that were hunters' first-choice prey, and increases in human occupation of available habitats. People started to broaden their diets to second-choice and third-choice foods including more small game and plant foods requiring a lot of preparation, such as grinding, leaching, and soaking in order to decrease the risk of unpredictable variation in food supply. People ultimately transported various wild plants from their natural habitats to more productive habitats. They also began intentional cultivation. The coming lifestyle of agriculture was in competition with the already established hunter-gatherer …show more content…
Individual wild animals have various traits which affect their desirability to humans. Cases in which the same ancestral species became selected for alternative purposes of domestication resulted in very different-appearing breeds or crops. Large terrestrial mammalian herbivores and omnivores were the wild animal species that most plausibly could have yielded valuable domesticates. Many independent lines of evidence meet to prove that normally the obstacle lays with the species itself, not withh the local people. The subtle factors that can derail domestication are portrayed by comparisons of domesticated wild species with never-domesticated close relatives. The six main barriers among wild mammal species were a diet not easily supplied by humans, slow growth rate and long birth spacing, nasty disposition, reluctance to breed in captivity, lack of follow-the-leader dominance hierarchies, and tendency to panic in enclosures or when faced with predators. Many species were still not domesticated because they failed one out of the six