By the way, over the next 40 weeks, you will frequently hear generalizations followed by the caveat “Unless you are the Mongols.” But one of the main reasons herding only caught on in certain parts of the world is that there aren’t that many animals that really lend themselves to domestication: Like, you have sheep goats cattle pigs horses camels donkeys reindeer water buffalo yaks all of which have something in common: They aren’t native to the Americas. Llamas are the only halfway useful herding animals native to the Americas, and lots of animals just don’t work for domestication. Hippos are large and provide lots of meat, and they mostly eat plants, but they also like to kill us, which makes them bad for herding. Zebras are too ornery; grizzlies’s wild hearts can’t be broken; elephants are too slow to breed. Which reminds me…it’s time for the open letter. An Open Letter to Elephants: Hey, Elephants. You’re so cute and smart and awesome; why you gotta be pregnant for 22 months? That’s crazy! And then you only have one kid! If you were more like cows, you might have taken us over by now. Like, here is the graph of cow population and here is the graph of cow population. Elephants, if you’d just inserted yourself into human life the way cows did, you could have used your intelligence and power to form secret societies conspiring against the humans and then you could have risen up and destroyed us and made an awesome elephant world with elephant cars and elephant planes, but nooooo you’ve gotta have 22-month pregnancies with one offspring and tusks that people want to kill you for. It’s so depressing. Best wishes, John Right so but back to why the Agricultural Revolution occurred. We don’t have records, but historians love to make guesses: Maybe population pressure necessitated agriculture even though it was more work, or abundance gave people leisure time to experiment with domestication or planting originated as a fertility right or—as some historians have argued—people needed to domesticate grains in order to produce more alcohol. Darwin, like most 19th century scientists, believed agriculture was an accident, saying:
By the way, over the next 40 weeks, you will frequently hear generalizations followed by the caveat “Unless you are the Mongols.” But one of the main reasons herding only caught on in certain parts of the world is that there aren’t that many animals that really lend themselves to domestication: Like, you have sheep goats cattle pigs horses camels donkeys reindeer water buffalo yaks all of which have something in common: They aren’t native to the Americas. Llamas are the only halfway useful herding animals native to the Americas, and lots of animals just don’t work for domestication. Hippos are large and provide lots of meat, and they mostly eat plants, but they also like to kill us, which makes them bad for herding. Zebras are too ornery; grizzlies’s wild hearts can’t be broken; elephants are too slow to breed. Which reminds me…it’s time for the open letter. An Open Letter to Elephants: Hey, Elephants. You’re so cute and smart and awesome; why you gotta be pregnant for 22 months? That’s crazy! And then you only have one kid! If you were more like cows, you might have taken us over by now. Like, here is the graph of cow population and here is the graph of cow population. Elephants, if you’d just inserted yourself into human life the way cows did, you could have used your intelligence and power to form secret societies conspiring against the humans and then you could have risen up and destroyed us and made an awesome elephant world with elephant cars and elephant planes, but nooooo you’ve gotta have 22-month pregnancies with one offspring and tusks that people want to kill you for. It’s so depressing. Best wishes, John Right so but back to why the Agricultural Revolution occurred. We don’t have records, but historians love to make guesses: Maybe population pressure necessitated agriculture even though it was more work, or abundance gave people leisure time to experiment with domestication or planting originated as a fertility right or—as some historians have argued—people needed to domesticate grains in order to produce more alcohol. Darwin, like most 19th century scientists, believed agriculture was an accident, saying:
aarg._revolution.docx