Domestication Research Paper

Words: 812
Pages: 4

For most of us today, we get most of our food from commercial farms. Needless to say, agriculture is a big part of our everyday lives. However, humans have not always been obtaining their food this way. Before domestication of animals and plants, we got our food by going into the organism’s habitat and extracting it. The beginning of agriculture wasn’t a coincidence. Ancient man did not just replace their sharp sticks and baskets with shovels and pitchforks and decide over-night that taking animals and plants from their natural environment was a splendid idea. In fact, in the short term, agriculture was not splendid at all. Farming made us weaker, instead of running around chasing things, we just dug holes in the ground; it provided less nutrition; and due to farming there were more diseases. Of course now days, we are thankful of …show more content…
Domestication has changed the inner workings of plants and animals. This is because of the goals humans were trying to accomplish with these animals. For example wild wheat and barley shed their seeds onto the ground, which made gathering hard to accomplish. We wanted to eat the plant seed but we also did not want to hurt our backs. So when we did find the rare specimen that could not spill it seeds, we took that home and bred it so it would make more plants with that favorable trait. Another example of domestication we can all relate too is dogs. There are hundreds of species of dogs, but in the beginning there was only one species of dogs. Domestication increased the gene pool as humans had many uses for them. Golden Retrievers were bred to retrieve dead ducks, Bulldogs were bred to control bulls, Chihuahuas were bred to be our plaything, etc. Apart from the increased species count and changes of the static quo DNA, domestication also caused the animals to become less aware as their brain and acute senses