Why Humans Became Food Producers 237settlements. Without a notion of resource ownership, they
suggest that hunters would not be likely to postpone the
short-term gain of killing prey for the long-term gain of
continued access to animals in the future.^15 Eventually,
animal species domesticated in one area were introduced
into areas outside their natural habitat.
To sum up, the domesticators of plants and animals
sought only to maximize the food sources available to
them. They were not aware of the long-term and revolu-
tionary cultural consequences of their actions. But as the
process continued, the productivity of the domestic species
increased relative to wild species. Thus these domesticated
species became increasingly important to subsistence, re-
sulting in further domestication and further increases in
productivity.Other Centers of Domestication
In addition to Southwest Asia, the domestication of plants
and, in some cases, animals took place independently in
Southeast Asia, parts of the Americas (Central America,
the Andean highlands, the tropical forests of South
America, and eastern North America), northern China,
and Africa (Figure 10.4). In China, domestication of rice
was under way along the middle Yangtze River by about
11,000 years ago.^16 It was not until 4,000 years later, how-
ever, that domestic rice dominated wild rice to become
the dietary staple.
In Southeast Asia, decorations on pottery depicting
rice dated to between 5,000 and 8,800 years ago docu-
ment it as the earliest species to be domesticated there.
Nevertheless, the region is primarily known for the do-
mestication of root crops, most notably yams and taro.
Root crop farming, or vegeculture, typically involves
the growing of many different species together in a
single field. Because this approximates the complexity
of the natural vegetation, vegeculture tends to be more
stable than seed crop cultivation. Propagation or breed-
ing of new plants typically occurs through vegetative
means—the planting of cuttings—rather than the plant-
ing of seeds.
In the Americas, the domestication of plants began
about as early as it did in these other regions. One spe-
cies of domestic squash may have been grown as early asToday, deliberate attempts to create new varieties of plants take
place in many greenhouses, experiment stations, and labs. But
when first begun, the creation of domestic plants was not deliberate;
rather, it was the unforeseen outcome of traditional food-foraging
activities. Today, genetically engineered crops are being created to
survive massive applications of herbicides and pesticides. They are
also engineered to not produce viable seeds, which solidifies corpo-
rate control of the food industry.© Sepp Seitz
(^15) Alvard, M. S., & Kuznar, L. (2001). Deferred harvest: The transition from
hunting to animal husbandry. American Anthropologist 103 (2), 295–311.
(^16) Pringle, p. 1449.
vegeculture The cultivation of domesticated root crops, such
as yams and taro.
time, similar developments were taking place in south-
eastern Turkey and the lower Jordan River Valley, where
pigs were the focus of attention.^13 The recent analysis
of pottery vessels from the Near East and southeastern
Europe indicates that people were using milk from do-
mesticated cattle in a part of the Fertile Crescent by this
time as well.^14
Some researchers have recently linked animal do-
mestication to the development of fixed territories and
(^13) Pringle, p. 1448.
(^14) Evershed, R. P., et al. (^) (2008). Earliest date for milk use in the Near East
and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding. Nature. doi:10.1038/
nature07180.