Question

Examine the impact of domestication of animals on the life of the early man ?

Answer 1

Domestication of animals clearly helped the early humans in a lot of ways. Already there are quite a few good answers to the question and I am sure many more are to come. I am looking to draw everybody’s attention to this striking piece of research by Dr. Pat Shipman that says canine domestication may have been one of the reasons why our ancestors out-competed the Neanderthals.

Dr. Shipman, a retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, told National Geographic back in 2015:

“Neanderthals had been in Europe and into Asia for a couple of hundred thousand years before humans moved out of Africa into their home territory. The question has always been: Here are these two species, us and Neanderthals, which are closely related. We both made tools, had fire, were social and good hunters.

“So how come one survived and the other didn't? Especially as the one that was the outsider survived, when you'd think the one that had been there for hundreds of thousands of years would know the terrain and the animals and how to survive.”

She goes on to answer the question:

“Neanderthals seem to have specialized in stabbing an animal at close quarters with handheld weapons and wrestling it down. We had weapons we could launch from a distance, which is a very big advantage. There's a lot less risk of personal injury.

“Add into that mix the doggy traits of being able to run for hours much faster than we can, track an animal by its scent, then with a group of other wolf dogs surround the animal and hold it in place while you tire it out.

“The advantage for wolf dogs is that humans can come in and kill from a distance. The wolf dogs don't have to go and kill this thing with their teeth, thereby lowering the risk of injury and death from very large animals like mammoths.

“For humans, it meant you could find the animals a lot quicker and kill them more efficiently. More food, less risk, faster.”

But the story does not end with bringing a mammoth down. To quote Dr. Shipman again:

“Hanging around a dead carcass while you cut it up is a really dangerous place to be. There would be a lot of confrontation going on over the carcasses, and humans would certainly have lost a fair number of those confrontations—unless they had a new way to guard the carcass. Then they could risk living there. And that is the wolf dogs.”

Dr. Shipman has set out her groundbreaking argument in her book The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. You may buy it from Amazon; or, if you want to pay a bit more, from Harvard University Press