Evolution Of Animal Domestication

Today, we come home and are greeted by slobbery kisses from our animal companions. We don’t think it 's odd to be sharing a home with a different species, we 've been raised to love and accept animals since we were young. We eat hamburgers, but never think of where the meat comes from, we just know it has always been available, and will always be. Today, it 's hardly thought of how we came to trust and depend on other species, it 's just accepted as something that has always been around. Animal domestication is something everyone has experienced and taken advantage of without even realizing it.

Many thousands of years ago, humans appeared on the earth. While they were very similar to their ape cousins, there was a noticeable difference that

We began to explore and take over the earth. Today, every successful society uses animal domestication to feed themselves. In the 1600 's, the Dutch stumbled upon an island off the coast of Australia, and it was as if they were transported back thousands of years. The natives still used primitive weapons to hunt and kill prey. They had not discovered agriculture and were still living a hunter-gatherer life style. Their progress as a society had plateaued. They didn’t have a reliable food source and were essentially holding their brains back from being powered to their full potential and coming up with the most simple and basic innovations. The natives were all but wiped out by a superior race of people, because they didn’t have the necessary resources to drop everything and fight for their land. It 's hard to fight a war when you still have to go out and hunt for food every day. This proves that animal domestication plays a pivotal role in the advancement of human civilization. Food and meat were one of the first items used for trade. Pigs were the main food source in Europe, while cattle were mainly used in Asia. When these two groups of people met and discovered that their farm animals consumed the same resources but produced different products, both sides agreed to trade. Now, humans were able to have a wider variety of food which made it more reliable. If a disease spread that killed pigs and a society of people only used pigs as a food source, they would be in major trouble. With all their needs met, humans began creating things that weren 't necessary for their survival to make their lives easier. Humans don’t need temperature-controlled environments, but we would all agree that it definitely makes life better when we aren 't sweating all day in the summer and freezing in the winter. We also began keeping animals that were not necessary to our survival. A cat cannot help us hunt or provide fertilizer for our