Foundations of the Eart: Global Ecological Change and the Book of Job

So what is it, the unicorn or the wild ox? These two translations of Job 39:9 differ as to the creature that is the topic of God’s question from the whirlwind. These two creatures, one now extinct and one that never existed, are used by translators for the Hebrew word

(re’em, a wild, untamable animal) in the Hebrew Job text. Unicorn is also translated from re’em in the Greek Septuagint (as monokeros) and in the Latin Vulgate (as unicornis).1 The unicorn and the wild ox are part of God’s question to Job, “Do you know how to domesticate fierce, wild animals?” The unicorn and the wild ox illustrate different facets of this question. These creatures are discussed below, followed by a narrative on the large topic of plant and animal domestication, and then of the eventual environmental consequences of such domestication. The larger issue here really is not the proper translation of re’em; rather, it is, “How are animals domesticated, and what are the implications of such domestication for human activity?” But first, a discussion of the creatures, the unicorn and the aurochs.

Nowadays, we relegate the unicorn to imaginary or mythological status, but it was originally reported as a real animal by Ctesias of Cnidus (fifth century BCE), the physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon (Xerxes) in Persia. Ctesias enthusiastically reported on his experiences in Persia in his book Persica. He also compiled what was reported to him about India in his book Indica.² The unicorn, as described by Ctesias in Indica, was a one-horned wild ass, a creature extant in India.³

In India there are wild asses as large as horses, or even larger. Their body is white, their head dark red, their eyes bluish, and they have a horn in their forehead about a cubit in length. The lower part of the horn, for about two palms distance from the forehead, is quite white, the middle is black, the upper part, which terminates in a point, is a very flaming red. Those who drink out of cups made from it are proof against convulsions, epilepsy, and even poison, provided that before or after having taken it they drink some wine or water or other liquid out of these cups.⁴

It is thought Ctesias’s unicorn was derived from a garbled description of the rhinoceros. Nonetheless, a century later, Megasthenes, who actually traveled to India, reported “horses with a single horn, and a head like a deer” found there.⁵ Probably elaborating from these more ancient chroniclers, Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder, among others, reported the existence of the unicorn and its complex attributes.

With the endorsement of famed ancient scholars, the unicorn became part of the repertoire of medieval creatures. It was described in the Physiologus,6 a Greek text from fourth-century CE Alexandria. The oldest surviving versions are in Latin. The Physiologus collected ancient animal stories and other accounts from Aristotle, Pliny, and other natural philosophers into forty-eight or forty-nine chapters. The beasts, birds, and stones described in the chapters illustrated aspects of early Christian dogma. The Physiologus was copied; translated into Ethiopian, Armenian, Syrian, and Latin; retold; and elaborated over the next several centuries. Most of these copies were lost, but several bestiaries based on the Physiologus were developed in the twelfth century.⁷ Some of these still exist. One is the Aberdeen Bestiary.⁸ The book was part of the Old Royal Library, a library assembled at Westminster Palace in 1542 by Henry VIII. It now resides in Aberdeen University’s library. Along with an illustration of a unicorn (the monoceros), the Aberdeen Bestiary describes:

The monoceros is a monster with a horrible bellow, the body of a horse, the feet of an elephant and a tail very like that of a deer. A magnificent, marvellous horn projects from the middle of its forehead, four feet in length, so sharp that whatever it strikes is easily pierced with the blow. No living monoceros has ever come into man’s hands, and while it can be killed, it cannot be captured.

With complex elaborations, the hunt for the unicorn is the theme of several series of tapestries from the late sixteenth century. The central theme from this great collection of unicorn lore is that the creature is untamable or that it can only be tamed by special, mystical procedures. These latter procedures involve the unique power of virgins over the otherwise untamable unicorn and serve as allegories of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus.

The accounts of ancient authorities and the incorporation of the unicorn into spiritual teaching and striking religious art would help convince the translator that the unicorn is, indeed, an excellent word for the Hebrew re’em. Additionally, the existence of what seemed to be actual “unicorn horns” would have been a compelling line of evidence that would incline a medieval translator (or the later translator of the King James Version) to use “unicorn” for re’em.

Unicorn horns were part of the power paraphernalia of royal dynasties and popes. These “horns” were the long (two meters or more), straight, spiral tusks of a small whale called the narwhal, Monodon monoceros. The males of the species have a single ivory tusk, which actually is an elongated left tooth.¹⁰ Thus, the scientific name of the species translates to “one-tooth one-horn.” The trading pathway of these helical ivory tusks from the seas above the Arctic Circle through Viking intermediaries to the courts of Europe—as well as the derring-do of the medieval confidence men who were bold enough to sell these remarkable objects to the medieval power elite—is the stuff of an action movie. Narwhal tusks are part of the royal jewels of several nations. A narwhal tusk still resides at the Schatzkammer (Imperial Treasury) in the Hapsburg’s Hofburg Palace in Vienna. King Christian V of Denmark was anointed in 1670 on a throne made of narwhal tusks.

The unicorn is commonly displayed in coats of arms and other heraldic emblems. Two unicorns stand as the supporters of the Royal Coat of Arms of Scotland.11 The beasts are leashed with golden chains, indicating that the creatures cannot be tamed and, by extension, neither can Scotland. In these representations, as in the Scottish coat of arms, the unicorn is horselike, with a long spiraled single horn, a goat’s beard, a lion’s tail, and cloven hooves. Cloven hooves would zoologically remove this representation of the unicorn from any close taxonomic relationship with the single-hoofed horses. It would similarly remove it from any close taxonomic relation with the rhinoceros, which often is posited as the source animal for the unicorn’s description.¹²

Through its long and fictitious history, the unicorn represents an untamed and untamable creature. Medieval legends notwithstanding, it symbolizes an intrinsically wild thing that cannot be made otherwise.

The second creature used by translators for the re’em is the wild ox or aurochs (Bos primigenus), the species from which domestic cattle were derived. The aurochs stood as much as 180 centimeters tall at the shoulder and weighed a thousand kilograms.¹³ The males were black-brown with a pale stripe down the spine. The females and calves were reddish-brown. The long aurochs horns pointed forward and were lyre shaped—going outward at the base and then curving inward at the tips. Evolutionarily, the aurochs originated in what is now India in the Pleistocene epoch between 1.5 and two million years ago.¹⁴ The Pleistocene began about two million years ago and featured an alternation of intense glacial periods (“ice ages”) with relatively milder interglacials. We are living in an interglacial we call the Holocene epoch, which began about 12,000 years ago.

Aurochs spread through Asia and eventually to northern Africa and Europe.15 The species’ range contracted southward during geological intervals of more intense glaciation. Aurochs were large, mean-tempered, dangerous beasts. These were the stereotypic attributes of the aurochs perhaps well into prehistory. The beautiful Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux and Liveron, France, estimated to be 17,300 years old, are illustrated with striking images of aurochs. The Hall of Bulls in the Lascaux caves features paintings of four black aurochs, including one that is 5.2 meters long.¹⁶ It is inappropriate to speculate on the “meaning” of the aurochs images at Lascaux and Liveron, but we do have a long history of the aurochs as a symbol of power. This symbolic imagery certainly sharpens as the time reference becomes closer.

A striking piece of ancient architecture, the Ishtar Gate, named for the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, has a blue-tile mosaic incorporating alternate rows of dragons and aurochs in bas-relief. This beautiful part of the Ishtar Gate, fourteen by thirty meters, has been reconstructed and is displayed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The Ishtar Gate, the eighth gate to the inner city of Babylon, was built about 575 BCE—the time of Nebuchadnezzar II and of the Babylonian captivity of the people of Judah. This is also contemporaneous with the compilation of the Book of Job during the Babylonian captivity.¹⁷ This reinforces the wild ox as an appropriate translation for the Hebrew re’em, as does the possible cognate rimu, Assyrian for wild ox.

The fierceness of the aurochs made them a trophy animal for hunters wishing to demonstrate their prowess against a worthy foe. This practice appears to have been widespread, and there is a vivid account from the first century BCE in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (6:28):

These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this kind of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most sumptuous entertainment.¹⁸

For the aurochs, hunting pressure with habitat change and the transfer of diseases from domesticated cattle restricted the range of the animal to eastern Europe by the thirteenth century.19 Even with the eventual cessation of aurochs hunting by noblemen and attempts to conserve the aurochs, the species remained in irreversible decline. The last aurochs, a female, died in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland in 1627. Even though it is extinct, the aurochs remains a symbol of power. It serves in this context as in the national symbols of Romania and Moldavia as well as in the coats of arms of several European provinces and municipalities.

Aurochs are the source animals for domestic cattle. It is hard to imagine the docility seen in a modern Holstein dairy cow emerging from the menacing aurochs, although the Holstein bull remains a formidable animal. If the re’em in the whirlwind question is the wild ox or the aurochs, then the answer to the whirlwind question should be that people can and have domesticated the re’em. Job, although he owned five hundred yoke of oxen (Job 1:3), apparently did not know this (Job 40:3–5). One must sympathize with Job on this issue. It is quite surprising that a belligerent, powerful creature such as the aurochs could be tamed at all. This is also the case for the next topic animal. How was the first domesticated animal, the dog, derived from a pack-hunting fierce predator, the wolf?

The unicorn illustrates that there are some animals that intrinsically cannot be domesticated. The other member of the pair of animals we have discussed, the aurochs, reflects that some remarkably fierce creatures can be tamed and domesticated. Francis Dalton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, wrote an early essay on domestication and summarized its necessary conditions. His list of conditions is quoted here and is followed by a more modern disambiguation derived from the work of Juliet Clutton-Brock:

The first domesticated animal was the dog (Canis familiaris), which from several different lines of evidence was obtained from the wolf (Canis lupus) at least 15,000 years ago and perhaps but debatably earlier.21 The domestication of tamed wolves did not have as much of the intrinsic nature of the animal to overcome as the domestication of some other animal might have had. Wolves conform well to Galton’s conditions, but most animals do not. But how could wolves have been tamed, given their ferocious natural state? Wolf taming would seem a risky task for anyone to undertake, particularly the first time it was tried.

Some have conjectured that wolves might have been tamed by becoming accustomed to humans because they were cleaning up after the kills made by human hunters or scavenging in Stone Age human waste dumps.²² One certainly finds ample supplies of feral dogs associated with the refuse heaps of modern cities, but these are domestic dogs transitioning back to a wild state. Domestication works in the opposite direction—from wild to tame to domesticated.

An alternate method of wolf taming is revealed in historical as well as recent records. The first are from accounts from explorers and travelers; the latter from reports of anthropologists. As an initial example of an early anthropological account of animal taming consider the report on the “Guiana Indians” living in the upper reaches of the rivers of British Guiana and reported by W. E. Roth.²³ This compilation includes a remarkable inventory of how to make the crafts and material of these people, ranging from how to weave a hammock, ink tattoos, build an alligator hook, and make patterned baskets. Providing a hint of his thoroughness, Roth described over seventy “cat’s cradles” (patterns made of a loop of string with the fingers) and their transitional sequences used to illustrate stories and games. His chapter on the topic “Animals under domestication and captivity” begins: “Women will often suckle young mammals just as they would their own children; e.g. dog, monkey, oppossum-rat, labba, acouri, deer, and few, if any are the vertebrate animals which the Indians have not succeeded in taming.”²⁴

Roth’s report of women nursing baby animals in the hinterlands of British Guiana is not a one-off, weird observation from the wilds of the South American rainforest. There are legions of such cases collected from all over the world for a range of indigenous peoples. Suckling baby animals is sufficiently alien to a European explorer’s expectation that one would expect it to be reported. Observations come from all the populated continents and Oceania. Along with pigs, bears, and menagerie of other creatures, puppies receive frequent mention in these accounts.25

One can easily appreciate that nursing baby animals would reduce their fear of humans, behaviorally imprint them on humans, and ultimately tame them. Hunting people in their pursuit of food encounter baby animals, often after killing their mother in her lair. When these babies are brought back to the hunters’ base camp, the nursing and feeding of the pups, along with the inevitable play with young children afterward, is widespread as a method of taming wild animals for companionship and potentially for food in difficult times.²⁶

Is this the first step in the transformation of the wolf into the dog? The interrelation between Australian Aboriginal people and the Australian dingo serves as a useful example in a hunting-and-gathering society somewhere between the taming process and the ultimate domestication of dogs.

The Australian dingo (Canis lupus dingoensis) is classified as a subspecies of the wolf, even though it is often referred to as the aboriginal “dog.” To tame dingoes, aboriginal women suckle dingo pups removed from their mothers. From observations of wildlife biologists working with dingoes, pups taken from their mothers when their eyes are still shut (up to thirteen days old) and nursed with milk from eyedroppers imprinted on humans and grew up to become good pets. In the same study, dingo pups taken from their mothers only a few days older, but after their eyes had opened, were all difficult or even impossible to train.²⁷

The dingo is a relative newcomer to Australia.²⁸ Human habitation in Australia dates from at least forty to sixty thousand years ago and is possibly even earlier, but archaeological evidence of dingoes shows up only about four thousand years ago.²⁹ The skull structure of dingoes resembles that of South Indian pariah dogs and Thai dogs.³⁰ Their skull measurements overlap in these same skull measurements with wolves, particularly Asian wolf subspecies (the Indian wolf, Canis lupus pallipes; and the Arab wolf, C. lupus arabs).³¹

The dingo’s arrival to Australia was almost indubitably as passengers on boats from a location in southern Asia. The people who supplied the dingo to Australia were probably the Lapita people, seafarers who soriginated somewhere near Taiwan about six thousand years ago.32 Based on the practices of the voyaging Polynesians, a later group of ocean-exploring people whose languages imply they were derived from the Lapita, the dingo may have been on board as a portable food item on its boat trip to Australia.³³

Studies on the genetics of dogs place the dingo in a group with several older dog breeds.³⁴ These include ancient breeds such as the New Guinea singing dog, the African basenji, and the greyhound. Also grouped with the dingo by this analysis are a number of more modern breeds of dogs. Subsequent studies support a close relation between the dingo and Asian dogs and imply a separation of the dingo from the Asian parent stock at approximately six thousand years ago. Given the variability in such estimates, this date is consistent with the archeological evidence of the species’ presence.³⁵ At the about same time in Australian prehistory one finds of remains of dingoes, and contemporaneously there is a widespread change in aboriginal weapons (for example, a switch to the use of smaller spear points) and a disappearance of the largest marsupial carnivores, Thylacinus (sometimes called the Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger) and Sarcophilus (the Tasmanian devil) from mainland Australia.

The dingo provides an example how the process of converting wolves to dogs might proceed. The suckling of baby animals, including wolf pups, has ample representation as a human practice from cultures all over the word and represents an effective method of animal taming. The Australian aboriginal example is significant because the imprinting and taming of the animals by breast feeding the pups is still part of the bonding process between animal and human. When this bond is established, dingoes function much like domestic dogs. Today, the greater convenience of the dog versus the dingo has produced a shift in favor of dogs for Aboriginal people. Also, because of their hybridization with dogs, purebred dingoes are disappearing.³⁶

Consider the hypothetical case in which a human hunting group manages to tame wolf pups. When hard times reduce the food supply, a selection process arises if the less docile members of the tamed wolves are the first to be put on the menu. If the people in this hypothetical case can carry the tamed wolves over several generations, then human control of the animals’ breeding and genetic destiny becomes an artificial selection process.

The phrase “artificial selection” was used by Darwin to describe processes that produced domesticated animals and plants and also to indicate the power of natural selection to produce new species:

Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection.³⁸

An intriguing long-term experiment on the results of selection for tameness and against aggression in foxes (Vulpes vulpes) was developed in Novosibirsk, Russia, in 1959 by Dmitry K. Belyaev.40 The larger intent of the study was to understand better the process of dog domestication using another canid species, the fox. One aspect of the experiment was to observe the change in other physical features in animals that had been selected only for tameness. There are several features that domesticated animals share: the development of dwarf and giant varieties, piebald coat color, wavy or curly hair, shortened tails and fewer vertebra, floppy ears, and changes in the reproductive cycles of the animals. Belyaev spent the last twenty-six years of his life on this experiment, and his colleagues have continued up to the present.⁴¹

Belyaev’s experiment bred silver foxes (a fox variety used in the fur trade) and then selected successive generations of offspring for tameness. The foxes spent their time in cages and were only allowed brief contact with humans. When they reached the age of sexual maturity at about seven or eight months, the foxes were graded on their friendliness toward humans based on a standard scoring system. For each new generation of foxes, 4 or 5 percent of the tamest males and 20 percent of the tamest females were allowed to breed to produce the next generation.

The tamest class of foxes in the scoring system, the “elite domesticated” class, were animals that were eager to establish human contact. They whimpered to attract human attention, wagged their tails, and licked the experimenters, just as dogs might. Ten fox generations into the experiment, the domesticated elites made up 18 percent of the population, by the twentieth generation 35 percent, and after forty years about 70 to 80 percent of the fox population.⁴² Other changes also were occurring with the elites: reduction in the fear response, floppy ears, shorter legs, rolled tails, shorter tails. The genetics of these traits, which also show up in other domesticated animals, and the selection for behavior (tameness) are still being explored.⁴³

The foxes from this study were selected favoring the tamest individuals. The results after a surprisingly short period of time are “domesticated” foxes that enjoy human companionship. These domesticated foxes are enthusiastically affectionate toward people. Videos of them playing with people are fun to watch and bring a smile to the observer. The affectionate creatures resulting from this study are currently being sold as luxury pets on the Internet.

One of the results of Belyaev’s study was an illustration of how fast domestication could develop. Selection toward docile tamed animals by humans eliminating the fiercer ones in a breeding population of tamed wolves should work in a similar fashion to produce the dog.

The use of nuclear DNA in the blood, semen, or saliva of perpetrators in criminal proceedings for identification purposes is commonly reported in the news. Similar application of DNA technology determines the relatedness of animal species and produces a second line of evidence on the time of origin of dogs. Mutations cause variations in the DNA or the genes of animals and plants. These genetic mutations accumulate over generations, and the DNA of two related species becomes progressively more different. This provides an evolutionary “clock.” The greater the numbers of different mutations, the longer the time since two species were derived from a common ancestor. By such analyses, the domestic dog appears to have derived from the wolf about 15,000 years ago. Given the precision of such calculations, this estimate matches the archeological evidence.

Further insight comes from a third line of evidence involving the analysis of a special type of DNA called mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria are organelles inside cells that drive the cells’ energy metabolism. Like the nucleus of the cell, they also contain DNA. Unlike nuclear DNA, half of which is from the organism’s mother and the other half is from its father, mitochondrial DNA is passed from generation to generation only from the mother—egg cells have it; sperm cells don’t. The mitochondrial DNA’s mutations also can be used as a genetic “clock.” This clock counts the time since two individuals’ ancestors shared a common mother.

A recent mitochondrial DNA study by Jun-Feng Pang and a large team of molecular geneticists inspected the genetics of well over a thousand dogs.46 Data analyses produced results consistent with the dog arising as a domesticated animal from a location in southern China from multiple tamed wolves (perhaps several hundred) sometime between 11,500 to 16,300 years ago. A core of genetic material appears to be shared by all dogs. Dog population genetic diversity drops away as one moves away from a region of China south of the Yangtze, which has the maximum genetic diversity found. When “founding populations” with a subset of the total population of genetic diversity spread out from the location of origin, some of the genes are lost, and the genetic diversity decreases. This is same rationale is applied in human genetics to support an “out of Africa” hypothesis for human dispersal from the genetically diverse Africa.

The most straightforward explanation of this Chinacentric pattern of dog mitochondrial DNA would be that there was a domestication “event” involving several different animals in China south of the Yangtze River, the place of the dog’s origin. The combination of the genes in the mitochondrial DNA implies that this domestication of wolves involved at least fifty-one females. Presumably somewhere in the region of China south of the Yangtze River, a tribe or tribes of sedentary hunter-gathers (or early agricultural) peoples traded the wolves they had tamed. Eventually, dogs were domesticated from these tamed wolves. Pang and his colleagues speculate that the antiquity of the still current regional practice of eating dogs implies that the first dogs were primarily domesticated as a meat animal.⁴⁷

Much remains to be learned about the evolution of the dog as a product of wolf domestication. The determination of the timing of the initial domestication of dogs remains a scientific challenge to unravel.48 However, it is clear that dogs were the first domesticated animal and were likely domesticated by a hunting and gathering people, probably in East Asia sometime in the late Pleistocene around 15,000 years ago.

If the first domesticated animal, the dog, was initially tamed from the wolf by the succor of women, how might the aurochs, the wild ox from Job, be tamed? Given the strength of the animal and its potential to harm its captors, it is difficult to understand the utility of a semitamed aurochs to a Neolithic people. The logistics of containing potentially large creatures such as an aurochs immediately implies a more settled situation than one normally expects of the hunter-gather lifestyle—it is enough of a challenge to contain the creatures in the first place; moving them about with a change of hunting grounds is a substantial additional difficulty. The taming of the aurochs, as well as a number of other large grazing and browsing animals, developed along with the invention of crop agriculture in the Fertile Crescent region of western Asia.⁴⁹

The Fertile Crescent was a region of rich soils and complex topography that arched from Mesopotamia (with the watersheds of the lower Tigris and Euphrates rivers) to the Levant (modern Israel, Palestine, and the western part of Jordan). It was bounded on the south by the Syrian Desert and the Anatolian highlands to the north. On a modern map, the Fertile Crescent region would include Iraq, the western edge of Iran, Syria, the southeastern edge of Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel. Ecologically, this was a region with a rich mixture of plant and animal species from both Africa and Asia. This biotic diversity contained the progenitors for early crops, which would eventually sustain complex human cultures: emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), einkorn (T. monococcum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), flax (Linum usitatissimum), the chickpea (Cicer arietinum), pea (C. arietinum), lentil (Lens culinaris), and bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia).

The Fertile Crescent was also in a zone of overlap of the ranges of the wild progenitors of the four of the five important animals that compose the Western domesticated animal “kit” (cows, goats, sheep, and pigs). The fifth member of this kit, the horse, was found nearby. In parts of the Fertile Crescent, the ecosystem’s productivity was great enough that hunting-and-gathering societies were able to prosper and eventually construct cities. This more sedentary lifestyle allowed plant domestication and the domestication of the meat animals of Western civilization—goats, sheep, pigs, and the topic of this section, cattle.

One proposed mode of aurochs taming would maintain wild herds of aurochs near a village by providing strategic supplies of salt (or water) to the herd. Plant protoplasm differs from that of animals by the virtual absence of sodium in most plants. Large herbivores excrete large amounts of sodium but feed on plants that have very little sodium in their tissue. To replace the excreted sodium, these animals are drawn to any available supply of salt. For a living example of this practice from the Assam Hills of northern India, free-ranging bovids called mithans (Bos frontalis), a domesticated wild gaur (Bos gaurus), can be entreated to take salt from people’s hands.50 The resultant tamed creatures are not used as food or for labor. Instead, they are used in ritual sacrifices—usually with a sequence of increasingly larger sacrificial animals, building to the crescendo of a mithan as the ultimate sacrifice. Mithan are also bartered as part of the bride price by the hill tribes of Assam.

As an intermediate stage of the process, the mithan represents a potential model of the domestication of aurochs (much as the dingo was proposed as an intermediate case of wolf–dog domestication). Such a practice on aurochs would provide an available herd close at hand should a meat supply be needed. Further, if the mithan can be taken as a broader model, one expects that the animals were also used for ritual practices.⁵¹ Such appears to be the case in early archaeological sites of people who had cattle. Eventually, aurochs taming would involve rearing young aurochs calves in some sort of enclosed conditions. The first available sign of domestication in aurochs is smaller animals. From Neolithic times to the Iron Age, cattle shrunk to only a meter tall at the withers (the area between the shoulders). Today, these sizes are found in dwarf breeds.⁵²

The time of the “first” domesticated population of a species is intrinsically difficult to ascertain in the spectrum of hunting and capturing, taming and domestication.53 There is some evidence of domesticated cattle from the oases of western Egypt as early as 7700 BCE.⁵⁴ A significant and very early archeological record of domestic cattle comes from the site of a settlement in Anatolia (in modern Turkey) called Çatal Hüyük,⁵⁵ an ancient city with of population of around five thousand to six thousand people.⁵⁶

Located on the bed of a dried-out ancient lake, the Konya Plain in central Anatolia, Çatal Hüyük survived for a millennium after its origin between eight and nine thousand years ago, from the middle of the seventh millennium BCE. Cattle bones from the site date from 5800 BCE, and there is the strong likelihood that cattle were domesticated animals there five hundred years earlier than that. Joining these dates would place domestic cattle in Anatolia originating at about 8,300 years ago.

Çatal Hüyük was a remarkable place, particularly for its time. It is the largest known preliterate site in Asia. It had a complex culture that compares to other Near East centers of developing civilization. Ongoing investigations for several decades have revealed much of the life of the city. Their diet resembled a shopping list from a modern health-food store: grains (naked six-row barley, emmer wheat, einkorn, along with other grains), legumes (peas and vetch), nuts (pistachios, acorns, and almonds), fruits and berries (apple, blackberry, and juniper), seeds of crucifers for oil, and leafy herbs. From the bones left in their rubbish, they were a cattle-raising people who also owned dogs. Ninety percent of the meat in their diet was from cattle.⁵⁷ For the other 10 percent of their meat protein, they hunted wild animals, mostly wild sheep and onagers.⁵⁸ While the town was centered on cattle raising, many of the frescos and molded figurines from the city featured leopards and leopard-skin-draped figures (no leopard bones have been found in the city) and images of red deer hunting (very rarely found among the bones left in the city).

Çatal Hüyük was a large, densely inhabited city with spectacular painted and incised mud-brick walls. It was filled with young people. The life expectancy for males was slightly over thirty-four years and for women slightly under thirty years. There were many adult women, over 60 percent of the population being female. It was a trading city for obsidian and animal hides, along with other goods such as baskets, bowls, textiles, and foodstuffs.59 Indeed, the variability in the appearance of the city’s inhabitants indicates the mixture of people that might be expected in a trade center. Analysis of the skeletons of the inhabitants indicated that they were strong, limber, and able to climb and bend easily.⁶⁰

In this vibrant place inhabited by a diverse people with artistic creativity and trading acumen, there was darker side to life: periodic outbreaks of the deadliest form of malaria—cerebral malaria caused by the mosquito-dispersed protozoan Plasmodium falciparum. Presence of malaria selects the human population for genetically based malaria resistance, but this resistance has a price. From evidence seen in the bones of people buried at Çatal Hüyük, 41 percent of the people there had severe anemia (either sickle-cell anemia or thalassaemia from abnormal blood hemoglobin). This is the genetically caused byproduct of strong selection for malaria resistance in a location with deadly malaria outbreaks.⁶¹

The city was first excavated by James Mellaart between 1961 and 1965, and it continues to be explored today.⁶² It is a remarkable example of the transformative power of plant and animal domestication on a human society. From such locations, cattle and other plant and animal domesticates eventually spread across the known world.

Scientists are studying the DNA of cattle to unravel the complex patterns of the spread of cattle across Eurasia and Africa. Analyses using mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted to subsequent generations only from the mothers, have already been discussed as tools for understanding the origin and dispersal of the dog. It has similar potential for the revealing aspects of the domestication of cattle. Cattle were domesticated at least twice in two well-separated locations.63

The first domestication was of the taurine cattle (Bos taurus). These were the sorts of beasts maintained by the Çatal Hüyük people. Mehrgarh, another ancient city in what is now Pakistan, also was a cattle city. Cattle herding there dates from as early as 5000 BCE—not as early as the 6300 BCE date for Çatal Hüyük but a very early date nonetheless. These Mehrgarh cattle were the product of a second domestication of the aurochs from the subspecies that occupied the Indian subcontinent. The domesticated animals, zebu cattle (Bos indicus), had prominent humps across their shoulders, and so do the modern breeds derived from them. Along with these two domestication events that produced the taurine and the zebu cattle, two other centers for independent domestication of the aurochs have been proposed: one in the Nile valley and one in northeastern Asia.⁶⁴

The portage of large animals in boats is a topic of religious epics, the Epic of Atra-Hasis from seventeenth-century BCE Sumer and its adaptation to the Epic of Gilgamesh in seventh-century BCE Babylon, or the Book of Noah in the Hebrew Bible. One significant movement of large animals appears to be the shipping of cattle from locations in northern Africa (from Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) to points in Spain, Italy, and Greece.65 The genes from these imported African taurine cows (specifically cows because this is a study of the female-based mitochondrial DNA of cattle) appear to have moved overland across northern Africa through Egypt from the Fertile Crescent. The northward spread of their genes stops when they reach the major European mountain ranges. The African cows shipped to Spain have genetically spread over Spain and Portugal, but their genes are not found in European cattle breeds north of the Pyrenees. Similarly, the Alps restrict the northward movement of cows’ genes shipped to Italy. In the case of cows shipped to Greece, there was little flow of genetic material beyond the northern Rhodope Mountains that lie on Greece’s border with Bulgaria.

North of these mountain boundaries, European cows from their domestication in the Fertile Crescent came overland across the Bosporus into Bulgaria and down into Albania. These cows swept across central and northern Europe into Germany, France, and England. During this expansion of the range of domesticated cattle, there is also evidence that there was some degree of interbreeding with wild aurochs, which presumably were well adapted to the local environment.⁶⁶ The result is a very complex multiple origin of European cattle with a considerable mixing of genetic material from distant and nearby locations.

One sees this same complex mixing in African cattle. Taurine cattle sweep west across the Mediterranean coast of Africa and then southward.⁶⁷ The Sahara at this time was grassland, and there may have been movements southward simultaneous with the push westward. Coming from the second locus of cattle domestication, zebu cattle were transported by ships, arrived in the Horn of Africa, and spread southward down the east side of Africa. The resultant complex genetic mixture is the source of genetic diversity for the varied cattle breeds found across Africa.

Mitochondrial DNA analysis reveals patterns in the movement and genetics of cows. In cattle breeding, the transport of breeding bulls often is used as an efficient way to change the genetic makeup of a cattle herd. Studies of the genes of Y-chromosomes, which are transferred only from father to son, also reveal the considerable historical mixing of cattle over Europe68 and presumably elsewhere. This complex genetic mélange has allowed the breeding and creation of a diverse array of breeds of modern cattle with a remarkable capacity to prosper in a wide range of environments.

Cattle provide humans with a remarkable array of goods and services. One indication of the value of such an animal to an agricultural people is the variety of aurochs-like creatures—mithans, bantengs, yaks, and water buffaloes, all of which have been domesticated. Domesticated species in the same genus (Bos) as aurochs (and cattle) are:

• Mithan (Bos frontalis). Gigantic dark-colored beasts found in forests in India (mostly) and across southeast Asia. As discussed earlier, the mithan seems a creature midway between a wild animal and a domesticated animal. The wild source of the mithan is the gaur (Bos gaurus), which is one of the largest land animals. Gaurs are exceeded in size only by elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotami. Gaur horns resemble the large crescent-shaped horns of the water buffalo; the horns of the mithan are flatter but equivalently imposing. Mithans are gaurs tamed by tribal people, who reward the free-ranging animals with salt. Mithans are used for ritual sacrifices, and they also are bartered for bridal dowries by the indigenous tribes living in the Assam Hills region of India.

• Banteng (Bos javanicus), also known as Bali cattle or tembadau. Well over a million domesticated banteng are found in Java, Borneo, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. They are similar in size to cattle but have a more slender neck and a smaller head. They are used as draft animals as well as for meat. As was the case for aurochs, bantengs differ in color by gender. The males are darker (black or dark chestnut) than either females or young, both of which are chestnut. They have white “stockings” on all four feet. The source animal, the wild banteng, is an endangered species, largely because of the illegal trade of banteng horns.⁶⁹

• Yak (Bos grunniens). Yaks are wooly, long-haired bovids found in Central Asia, the Tibetan plateau, Mongolia, and Russia. They are agile climbers, as might be expected for mountain animals. They are capable of carrying pack loads or a person at altitudes as high as six thousand meters for days and still remain in good condition.70 Along with their remarkable capability as a high-altitude pack animal, they are also used for meat and milk. Yellow-colored yak milk has a very high butter content and is a staple food for the Sherpa people. Because of its high fat content, it also is used by them for lighting campfires.⁷¹ The wild yak (Bos mutus), the source of the domesticated animal, is considered a vulnerable species because its population has declined 30 percent in the past thirty years.⁷²

These creatures are closely related to aurochs and hence to cattle. They are all in the genus Bos and can potentially interbreed across species, often yielding sterile hybrids. Yak can be crossed with cattle to produce a hybrid (males sterile, females fertile) called the dzo. Further hybridization of female dzo usually produces inferior animals and is not normally done.⁷³ Mithan can be hybridized with cattle to produce a draft animal in Bhutan.⁷⁴ Bantengs can interbreed with zebu cattle.⁷⁵

Another only slightly less related animal is:

• Water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis). Water buffalo are the plow animals that propel the traditional production and threshing of rice. The wild progenitor (Bubalus arnee) is the second largest wild bovid and is exceeded in size only by the gaur. Wild water buffalo are an endangered species, with fewer than four thousand individuals and possibly as few as two hundred animals lacking some domesticated water buffalo genes.76 The domesticated animals are in two main collectives of breeds: the swamp water buffalo of China and Burma and the river water buffalo of India.⁷⁷ River water buffaloes prefer clear running water and are better milk producers than the swamp water buffalo breeds, which are the draft animals for paddy-rice farming. The animals existed in a domesticated form in the Mohenjo Daro civilization of the upper Indus valley, in what is now Pakistan, as early as 2500 BCE.⁷⁸ By the seventh century CE, water buffalo had been introduced to Italy,⁷⁹ and the familiar mozzarella cheese in its various forms originates with a traditional Italian cheese, mozzarella di bufala campana, made from water buffalo milk.

When one takes this collection of domesticated bovids as a whole, there are significant similarities. They range over many contrasting habitats. They are very large animals with even larger, obviously dangerous, wild progenitors. Today, the wild sources are often endangered species and heading toward the same sad extinction that befell the aurochs.

The domestication of wild animals, the animals discussed here as well as the myriad of other creatures that have been put into the service of humanity, gave people the ability to change much of the surface of the planet. Various kinds of cattle, along with donkeys and horses, provided the power to plow land and transport produce. Goats, sheep, pigs, reindeer, and other manmade animals provided a way to turn the inedible grass and other vegetation found in some very harsh settings into milk, meat, and useful products.

For example, Petra, located in modern Jordan, is a remarkable archeological site. It is a city carved from stone, perhaps best known for its use as a set in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In the cracks and crevices in and around Petra, animals about the size of a large rabbit, called hyraxes (Procavia capensis), construct their protective stick nests. Hyraxes are unique animals whose nearest living relatives are elephants. Petra’s dry environment preserves hyrax nests from as long as two thousand years into the past. The changes in the kinds of sticks and other material used at different times in hyrax nest building reflect the vegetation near the nest site and, thus, record the vegetation history of the Jordanian landscape.⁸¹

In the region of Petra, material from progressively younger hyrax nests indicate that the landscape around the city degraded from an original Mediterranean forest of oaks (Quercus), pistachio (Pistacia), olive (Olea), pine (Pinus), and juniper (Juniperus) trees to a maquis (a degraded forest) and then to a garigue (an even further degraded shrubby forest) by the second century CE. After the collapse of Byzantine Petra, intensified grazing by livestock eventually reduced this vegetation to a Mediterranean batha (very open shrubby vegetation) and, in some cases, to sparse grassland.

This collapse of Petra’s vegetation under land abuse and particularly from overgrazing certainly demonstrates the power of domesticated range animals to alter a landscape radically. Is this record of the past two thousand years, featuring a linear and sad decline of the land, the necessary path of agriculture for the Fertile Crescent and the agricultural systems that developed there? There are other records from the Jordan Valley that go deeper into the past to provide a more complex historical and prehistorical rendition of change. This change goes from before the dawn of agriculture to the present.

The so-called Neolithic Revolution is considered the final stage of the Stone Age.82 It is associated with the development of agriculture, the transition from nomadic hunters to settled villages, and the use of domesticated animals and plants. The plant domestication process and a more settled village life produce a positive feedback—one encourages the other and vice versa. Domestication of plants is perfected in association with sedentary village life; sedentary villages are increasingly possible when agricultural crops have been developed. Extremely fertile locations are able to sustain sizable sedentary hunting-and-gathering communities and, thus, catalyze the positive feedback leading to the Neolithic lifestyle. The Fertile Crescent, with its early domestication of plants and animals, underwent this transition first.

Understanding the dynamics and evolution of the Neolithic Revolution involves collation of different sorts of prehistoric information. Archaeological studies can reveal the possible numbers of people at a location from the extent of ancient ruins and the materials that people used. Fragments of foods and scraps people leave behind provide clues to changes in farming and nutrition. Human bones can reveal the health of the people, their nutrition, and their life expectancy. Artifacts and art reflect cultural and religious practices. These analyses assembled over time capture the human condition as continuing technological innovation carries forward from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic (Copper) Age, to the Bronze Age, to the Iron Age, and to the near present. Archaeologists assemble these bits and pieces to reconstruct how the people at a location functioned. If these are analogous to a forensic evaluation of what has happened in a “room” at a time in the past, the analyses of pollen in lake sediments reveals the view through the window in this ancient, reconstructed room. One can “see” the surrounding vegetation. The change in the pollen record demonstrates the vegetation changing over time.

Dustlike grains of pollen provide major clues about the vegetation of the past. Wind pollination in plants, the bane of hay fever sufferers, is a relatively inefficient process. A great number of the pollen grains are lost on the way to the recipient flower. The “rain” of pollen from the plants covering a landscape can be preserved in lakes. Pollen analysis (palynology) reconstructs the past vegetation and reveals vegetation change. There has been much work done to reconstruct vegetation dynamics associated with the climate variations that have occurred over the past ten to twenty thousand years (and in many locations much longer).

Pollen grains recovered from the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea in the Jordan Valley reveal the vegetation changes in the lands of the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent as agriculture spread across the surrounding landscapes.83 Long cylindrical cores of mud taken from the lake bottoms provide clues to changes in the past.⁸⁴ From the layers of sediment laid down in the lake bottoms over the millennia, these pollen records document the surrounding vegetation for as far back as the past 17,000 years or more.⁸⁵

In this swing and sway, land-cover composition is pushed by human history (and impelling the course of history in return). One significant pattern is clear evidence of a second agricultural revolution, the Secondary Products Revolution.⁸⁶ Some five thousand years after the initial advent of agriculture, innovations in animal husbandry allowed production of wool, leather, and dairy products. The development of widespread fruit trees in the Fertile Crescent also was part of a second wave of agricultural land-cover change. This change was fueled by the power of harnessed domesticated animals to convert land to agricultural use. In the Fertile Crescent, orchards with plants that could be propagated from cuttings (grape, figs, sycamore figs, and pomegranate), knobs from the base of the tree (olives), or transplanted offshoots (dates) covered the hillsides.⁸⁷ The first agricultural revolution in this region featured annual grains and meat animals; orchard crops developed somewhat later. People could move after harvest time and take their herds to better pastures. The second agricultural revolution included perennial plants. There is evidence that figs were domesticated quite early near Jericho,⁸⁸ but these and other orchard-type food sources greatly increase during the Secondary Products Revolution. Also at this time, animals attained value beyond the meat that their carcasses could produce. Yoked oxen and perennial plants encouraged more sedentary agricultural production systems.

A second important pattern suggested in the pollen record and corroborated from archaeological evidence is that the development of civilization is not a linear forward progression with technological advances and levels of urbanization increasing inexorably over the years. Even before agriculture, the region supplying pollen to the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea saw ancient “prototowns” such as Jericho, ’Ain Ghazal, Es-Sifiya, Ghwair, and others, spring up and prosper.89 At these and other places like them, the more sedentary people began to develop and use domesticated plants. The prototowns prospered with the productivity of these early domesticated plants and then eventually were abandoned, perhaps as their local landscapes were deforested and their surrounding farmland degraded.⁹⁰ In the sediment cores, a reduction of the amount of pollen from deciduous oak trees indicates that these urban collapses may have arisen after local deforestation to obtain building timbers for multistory houses and firewood for heating and cooking. Following the collapse of the prototowns, almost three thousand years passed (until the Middle Bronze Age) before significant urbanization reoccurred in the region.

There are other recurring signals in the pollen record. Weed pollens increase when land is cleared, abandoned, or heavily grazed. Cities form, and the types of crop pollens shift to the cash crops sold in urban markets; cities fail, and pollen records show an agricultural shift to subsistence crops that provide food to their farmers.

The history the Levant is deep. The implication for modern times of the domestications of plants and animals from the general region is great. The major religions incubated there touch a sizable portion of the Earth’s modern population. However, another significant feature of its history, the sweeping landscape change driven by human culture, is not uniquely a phenomenon of the Levant. The Secondary Products Revolution is seen in Central American cities as well. Aztec and Mayan city-states had a significant effect on their surrounding rural environments.⁹¹ The pre-Columbian cities produced a market for specialized orchard products (cacao, Theobroma cacao; avocado, Persea americana), which led to agricultural landscapes across the surrounding region.⁹²

Humans have a remarkable capability to alter their surroundings. Human technology in all its manifestations provides increased capability to alter the regional landscape. Nonetheless, hunter-gatherers also have a remarkable capacity to alter land, notably by setting fires to obtain game and change the grazing grounds for hunted animals. The aboriginal people of Australia are famous for their use of fire as a game-management tool. “Fire-stick farming” is an example of extensive land alteration by these people.

With regard to the aboriginal people of Australia, it is generally thought that their anthropogenic fires produce a mosaic of landscape types; the “tiles” of the mosaic represent tracts of land burned at different times. Aboriginal fires are smaller, and the resultant fire mosaics of burned and regenerating vegetation are more finely grained.93 Their fires increase local nutrient availability and enhance the short-term productivity of herbaceous plants typical of the early stages of recovering vegetation.⁹⁴ The fires set are of lower intensity but occur more frequently than Australia’s natural, lightning-caused fires. The manmade fires often select particular types of vegetation for ignition.⁹⁵

One recent well-studied example of these practices in action involves the traditional hunting by a contemporary Aboriginal people (the Martu) in the Western Desert of Australia.96 The Martu sometimes set fires to “clean up” remote regions and to attract large turkey-like birds, bustards (Ardeotis australis), which forage in burned areas. However, most of their fires are set by women hunting the large monitor lizards called goannas (Varanus gouldii).⁹⁷ Martu fire hunts involve lighting up a suitable tract, walking behind the fire line searching for signs of fresh lizard burrows, and then using a specialized digging stick to root the animals from their dens. Fire control is a significant consideration. Individual hunters whose fire threatens a significant sacred site are subject to ritualized physical punishment and monetary payments. Martu fires are set to take advantage of the wind direction, and firebreaks control the direction of the fire’s spread. The Martu light their hunting fires in the winter; winter fires are more effective for lizard hunting, and the fires are more controllable.

In the case of the Martu, the women who hunt goannas and other small game using fires basically reconstruct the landscape ecosystem—their hunting creates a landscape different from what would occur without them, one more favorable to their activities. This is a positive outcome.⁹⁸ From their fires, the vegetation on the land is rearranged into relatively small patches. This fine-scale patch structure creates more biological diversity at the same spatial scales as the foraging ranges of the hunters. The immediate effect of the Martu women’s use of fire on their landscape creates greater numbers of animals of the species that they hunt. They are “farming” small game through fire management.⁹⁹

We have already discussed the extensive regionwide land changes that attended the Neolithic development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent and particularly in the Levant. The same sorts of major land cover changes occurs with the Neolithic Revolution in other parts of the world as well. For example, the spread of the Polynesian people across the Pacific provides some excellent examples of just how effective people equipped with stone tools can be as agents for landscape change. The navigational skills used in these remarkable voyages will be discussed in chapter 6.

Polynesian arrival at a new island is a discrete event. Thus, their effect on a landscape is relatively more straightforward to determine archeologically via an examination of the change of an island’s fauna and flora. The Polynesians sailing across the Pacific brought with them a “portmanteau biota”100 of transportable plants and animals, which sustained the Polynesian agricultural base. These included several domesticated animals (dogs, pigs, and chickens)—along with the Polynesian rat. A diverse collection of food-producing plants were transported as well. In the Polynesian colonization of Hawaii, these included coconut (Cocos nusifera), breadfruit (Artpcarpus altilis), candlenut (Aleurites molluccana), taro (Colocasia esculenta), sweet potato (Ipoemoea batatas), and banana (Musa acuminata). In colonizing other islands, these and several other food plants were either brought by the Polynesians or were already part of a particular island’s flora.¹⁰¹ Along with food crops, other plants with a range of other uses also were either actively transported or utilized from the local flora: hibiscus (Hibiscus tiliaceus), with leaves used for sealing earth ovens; acute (Broussonetia papyrifera), with bark that can be pounded into tapa cloth; and ironwood (Casuarina equisetifolia), used for war clubs as well as house and boat parts.¹⁰²

On the island of Mangaia in the Cook Islands, an interdisciplinary investigation documented the changes to the island before and after Polynesian habitation.¹⁰³ Mangaia is a small island (fifty-two square kilometers) with a central volcano. Shifts in the Earth’s crust raised the island, and what was a surrounding reef was elevated out of the ocean to become a collar around the central volcano. This raised coral is called Te maketa (in Mangaian) or makatea (in English). The makatea traps the sediment from the streams that drain the central volcano. It also provides refuge caves for the living and burial places for the dead.

About 1000 CE, the Polynesian people who would become the Mangaians arrived at the island. They modified the island landscape by clearing and cultivating the upland forests on the slopes of the central volcano. They farmed the uplands with an agricultural practice called swidden agriculture, also called cut-and-burn or shifting agriculture. Small patches of forest are cleared and planted to crops. These small plots are abandoned and returned to forest cover when the soil fertility becomes depleted locally and the crop productivity lessens. The forest in the former garden plots eventually recovers, and the land is cleared and farmed again.

On Mangaia, as often occurs with this farming system, when the human population densities became higher, the time allowed for recovery of the cropped patches was shortened to leave more land in cultivation. This eventually degraded the soil and produced soil erosion. The eroded soil from the uplands began to fill the area behind the makatea. On the heavily used upland, a soil process known as laterization converted what remained of the soil to laterite. Lateritic soil occurs when high rainfall washes out most of the more soluble soil compounds, leaving behind iron and aluminum oxides. Dry laterite resembles brick. With soil laterization, the upland zone of the island largely went out of agricultural production.

Neolithic people with neither draft animals nor metal tools can manifest landscape changes in a surprisingly short period of time. The implications from these changes to the power of technological human society to change the planet’s landscapes are obvious. In modern Polynesia, the change in landscapes continues. The technologies are different (guns instead of snares, chain saws instead of stone axes), but fire is used as a tool for clearing land nowadays just as in the past.104 This continued change is the case not just in the Polynesian islands but worldwide.

There has been a scientific discussion over the past two hundred years on the topic of what the human alteration of the land has done to various regional climates. The relatively rapid growth, land clearing, and installation of European agriculture in the United States represents a compression of land-change history. Whole regions were converted from forest to agriculture within the lifetimes of colonial observers. Iconic American figures endorsed two different points of view. Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia opined that “A change in our climate, however, is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged.”105 At about the same time, Noah Webster reported to the Connecticut Academy of Sciences:

It appears that all the alterations in a country, in consequence of clearing and cultivation, result only in making a different distribution of heat and cold, moisture and dry weather, among the several seasons. The clearing of lands opens them to the sun, their moisture is exhaled, they are more heated in summer, but more cold in winter near the surface; the temperature becomes unsteady, and the seasons irregular.¹⁰⁶

In assessing the change in winters, Webster noted that the “warmer winter” arguments, made by such luminaries as Abbé Du Bos, Buffon, Hume, Gibbon, Jefferson, and others, often drew from Bible-based evaluations of the past climates of Palestine and Judea. To refute these arguments, he cited the rich discussion of weather phenomena, particularly in the Book of Job and elsewhere in the Bible, concluding, “But the most positive evidence which can possibly exist to prove that the climate of Palestine has not suffered any increase of heat, for more than three thousand years, is the production of certain fruits in the days of David, which will not thrive in any but mild, warm countries; as pomegranates, olives and figs.”¹⁰⁸ These latter plants were the product of the Secondary Products Revolution, which we have just discussed. Two centuries after Webster’s presentations, computer models of North American climate change predicted that a relatively deforested America would differ significantly in its climate from a forested, precolonial version of the nation. These findings supported Webster’s contention that “frost followed the plow”—earlier onsets of cold weather in the fall across the middle of a cleared America.¹⁰⁹

Webster’s observations of land-cover change and its coupling with regional climate change is not a one-off occurrence. Such early observations of the consequences of land alteration came from several other scholars and historical figures. Some of these observations were produced by comparisons between regions in the Age of Exploration. For example, Christopher Columbus wrote to his son that he thought the forests of the West Indies caused more rainfall there than observed in the deforested Azores—an observation supported by computer-based climate model studies almost five centuries later.110 Other observations of the feedback between regional land cover and regional climate, like those of Webster, were fueled by the rapidity of land change often from the advent of the growth of human populations and urban markets. Antoine-César Becquerel in the mid-1800s famously answered his own question, “How do they [the forests] modify the temperature of the country?” with the conclusion that the presence of forests and other vegetation affected the climate. Becquerel’s conjecture and an equivalent one from Humboldt at about the same time have subsequently been borne out by modern studies.¹¹¹ Just as scholars of the past have wondered how the change in the cover of the land might affect climate, climate-vegetation feedbacks remain a central topic for today’s researchers attempting to appraise the actions of our modern society and its technological capability to alter the land. That our scale of alteration has increased from the regional scale to the global scale heightens the importance of understanding how our planet functions as a dynamic whole.

Beginning with the whirlwind question of domestication, this chapter has discussed the effects of plant and animal domestication on human societies and the lands they occupy. People have a remarkable power to alter landscapes, and that power is increasing. Landscape manipulation is part of our mode of survival from well before the discovery of agriculture. People alter landscapes and, as was noted immediately above, regional climate. Current technology has provided the means to change the face of the Earth. Indeed, if one looks from an airplane window, one sees the hand of humanity upon the landscape. Does the fire-stick farming of the Martu, which seems to be applied in a sustainable fashion, have any resemblance to our own (un)sustainable use of the landscape? At best, we have a lot more to learn. Some of what we need to know is adumbrated in our answers to other of the Joban whirlwind questions, questions involving the understanding of how the planet functions in a physical and biological sense.