Buy this book on Amazon: A Short History of the World
Humans initially led a nomadic ‘hunter-gatherer’ existence, moving from area to area, hunting animals and eating any digestible foods they could find, such as plants, nuts, berries and fruit. Eventually, people began returning every year to the same and the most fertile places. About 10,000 years ago, it seems humans worked out how to sow crops, a discovery which allowed them to move from hunting and gathering to farming and which had such a significant effect on the subsequent development of mankind that it has been named the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.8
Once people began living near each other, increased communications led to greater cooperation and to the exchange of knowledge. Yet it was the availability of more food that was fundamental to how mankind developed: more food led to more people and more people led to more settlements. The ability to produce and store food also meant that societies were eventually able to support non-food producing specialists such as artisans, holy men, bureaucrats and soldiers as well as political leaders.
While crops were helpful in yielding yarn for clothing, other clothes were provided by the hides of animals such as sheep, goats, cows and pigs, all of which mankind gradually domesticated. These animals also helped in other ways; their manure helped increase crop yields, as did the animals themselves by pulling ploughs, which in turn made more land suitable for farming.
A productive virtuous circle was established, but living together in permanent dwellings came with a downside: it meant that humans were now living near their own refuse and excrement. This was not conducive to hygiene at a time when humans neither understood the benefits of cleanliness nor knew about the existence of germs. Living in closer quarters with livestock also meant that diseases, which had developed in animals and to which humans had no immunity, were now able to jump across to humans and infect them. The major killers of humanity through the centuries – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, plague, cholera and AIDS – are all thought to have evolved originally in animals and then transferred over to humans via fleas or other carriers.
Jumping forward for a moment, the Black Death in the 14th century, the destruction of the native American populations at the time of Columbus, and the influenza of 1918 that reportedly killed some 20 million people – along with other plagues throughout the centuries – may all have originated in this way. The 21st century is no exception, with Swine Flu and Bird Flu acting as nasty reminders that rearing animals in close quarters – and inhumanely – might still come back to bite us (no pun intended).