Chapter 4 Of

Chapter 3. One Invention that led to Present-day Human Nature: The First Domestication of Animals Civilization is based, not only on men, but on plants and animals. J.B.S. Haldane Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time. Henry Beston 3.1 Instead of beginning a review of Homo Sapiens’ Most Important Properties by talking about the complex and puzzling Ability to Speak, it is clarifying to focus first on the simpler, and earlier acquired, Ability to Tame and Exploit some of their fellow Creatures What would you guess is the most numerous and common type of bird that now inhabits our planet? Is it the sparrow—e.g. the House Sparrow? Or the starling? Or the seagull— e.g. the Herring Gull? If my local newspaper is to be believed, the correct answer (by a very wide margin) is the chicken. The author of the short newspaper article from which I learned this prima facie fact did not have in mind the Prairie Chicken, of various species, which is listed in the index of my copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds (1964, p.277). Instead, the subject of this article was the domesticated chicken, comprised of familiar varieties like Rhode Island Red, White Leghorn, etc., whose meat you find for sale in grocery stores. In fact, humans eat the incredible number of about 30 billion of these birds each year, more than 1,000 per second. Nevertheless, Peterson does not see fit to discuss them at all in his book. There are at least two considerations that might lead professional ornithologists like Roger Tory Peterson not to pay attention to domesticated chickens. The first is that 2 these experts might suppose that, since chickens are closely associated with human beings, and since it is wrong to think of humans as parts of the natural world, it must follow from these points that domestic animals also cannot belong to that same world. However—in view of the facts that (a) there only is one planet Earth, and (b) at the present time humans and their activities take up a very large part of the energy and space of that planet—it might strike someone as unreasonable to the point of nonsense to suppose it is either appropriate or possible to distinguish the natural world on one side, from something else on the other. For example, another article from my newspaper anonymously quotes an author writing for The New Scientist as follows: Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years, we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet’s land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we’re leaving quite a mess behind: plowed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet. On the other hand, the opposing view is expressed in a third newspaper report entitled “New Age Quarrel”: A geological dispute is brewing as British geoscientists lead a push to establish a new chapter in the history of the Earth—one based on human activity, The Australian reports. The rabble-rousers argue that the changes wrought since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago are so profound 3 they are visible in the physical and living fabric of the planet. They have called for the creation of a new epoch in the official geological time scale, one they have named the Anthropocene. Detailed scientific arguments for designation of the Anthropocene are expected to be thrashed out in August [2008] at the 33rd International Geological Congress meeting in Oslo. One naysayer, Australian geologist Jim Gehling—who helped establish the Ediacaran period in the geological time scale—said: “This is just the vanity of the human species. We don’t need a geological epoch to describe a single historical event, however long- or short-lasting it might be.” A second point that might have led ornithologists not to recognize the importance or even the existence of chickens is that those birds and their eggs are only brought into being in the first place in order for them to be killed and eaten very soon afterwards. Accordingly, chickens are apparently little more than living products that humans have created (using various unnatural and artificial means to do so), in order to serve selfish purposes of their own. For instance chickens, considered in themselves, do not seem to have any independently sufficient reasons for existing, or any future state towards which natural processes are causing them to evolve. Again however, several points throw doubt on the usefulness of this last way of thinking about domesticated creatures. For one thing, the great majority of wild birds apparently live in much the same fashion, and on approximately the same time-scale, as chickens do. For instance, I remember reading in what struck me at the time as a credible source (however, I apologize for not remembering what source it was) that, on average, 4 of all the many billions of wild birds alive on the Earth at any particular moment, just one year later, fully half of them will be dead. Still another mitigating factor is that humans, employing their so-called artificial methods of domestication and selective breeding, are not the only creatures who have entered into symbiotic relations with organisms of other species. For instance, the biologist David Attenborough points out that certain species of ants raid the nests of ants of other species, and carry off the pupae they find there. When those pupae hatch, the young ants then serve their captors, by collecting food and feeding it to them. Attenborough says it is necessary for at least some of the “slave-making” ants to operate in this fashion, because these ants have such large jaws that they are not able to feed themselves. (See Attenborough, 1979, p.104.) In another book by the same author (1984, p.116) he describes still other kinds of ants that have discovered a way of getting access to the nutrients contained in grass, by using domesticated aphids as intermediaries. Aphids are tiny insects that only digest a small part of the sap they regularly suck from grass leaves, and excrete the rest as a sugary liquid known as honey-dew, which those ants are able to eat and digest in turn. Thus, the ants’ relations with the aphids turn out to be approximately the same as those of human dairy farmers with their cows. To speak more precisely, the ants collect the aphids into large herds, which they protect from other insects that invade their grazing area, by squirting the invaders with formic acid. Then they follow a regular schedule of “milking” the aphids, in order to nourish themselves with the resulting honey-dew. Attenborough adds that some of the farmer-ants even 5 encourage their aphids to produce more honey-dew than normally would be the case, by stroking them repeatedly with their antennae.1 I already have pointed out various respects in which human beings differ from all other animals. For example, one clear expression of their separation from creatures like dinosaurs, crocodiles, snakes, whales, koala bears, fish, etc. is the fact that archeologists cannot reconstruct, and thereby know, the particular style of life that once belonged to any particular human whose bodily parts they excavate, just by examining those remains 1 How long have ants been engaging in such behavior? An anonymous short article from my newspaper (“The First Farmers” The Globe and Mail, Monday, April 07, 2008, p.L6) runs as follows: “Long, long ago—millions of years before the Sumerians and Ur people of the Fertile Crescent discovered agriculture—a tribe of clever ants practiced a highly sophisticated form of farming, and their evolutionary descendants are still at it,” David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronical writes. “Those ants were the world’s first farmers, harvesting leaves from trees and bushes, chopping the leaves into nutritious pulp, feeding the pulp to nourish their cultivated crops of fungus, and harvesting the fungus to feed themselves. It’s the oldest example of agriculture in the world by far, and entomologists at the Smithsonian Institution have now constructed an evolutionary tree to reveal that the very first ancestral ant farmers emerged in the world some 50 million years ago.” 6 themselves.2 Accordingly, anthropologists not only need to examine the remains of human bodies, but also any physical artifacts they find in the same area as those remains, because those artifacts act as “extensions” of the bodies of the humans who made them.3 Furthermore, archeologists look for evidence of domesticated plants, animals, and fungi in the vicinity of the human skeletons they excavate, because creatures of those sorts are 2 Consider the following passage from the last part of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea: He could not talk to the fish anymore because the fish had been ruined too badly. Then something came into his head. “Half-fish,” he said. “Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for nothing.” He liked to think of the fish and what he could do to a shark if he were swimming free.

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