The 12th Planet Read Free

the process detailed in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.
     
And the Lord said:
     
"Let the Earth bring forth grasses;
     
cereals that by seeds produce seeds;
     
fruit trees that bear fruit by species,
     
which contain the seed within themselves."
     
And it was so:
     
The Earth brought forth grass;
     
cereals that by seed produce seed, by species;
     
and trees that bear fruit, which contain
     
the seed within themselves, by species.
     
    The Book of Genesis goes on to tell us that Man, expelled from the orchard of Eden, had to toil hard to grow his food. "By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," the Lord said to Adam. It was after that that "Abel was a keeper of herds and Cain was a tiller of the soil." Man, the Bible tells us, became a shepherd soon after he became a farmer.
     
    Scholars are in full agreement with this biblical sequence of events. Analyzing the various theories regarding animal domestication, F. E. Zeuner
(Domestication of Animals)
stresses that Man could not have "acquired the habit of keeping animals in captivity or domestication before he reached the stage of living in social units of some size." Such settled communities, a prerequisite for animal domestication, followed the changeover to agriculture.
     
    The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, and not necessarily as Man's best friend but probably also for food. This, it is believed, took place circa 9500 B.C. The first skeletal remains of dogs have been found in Iran, Iraq, and Israel.
     
    Sheep were domesticated at about the same time; the Shanidar cave contains remains of sheep from circa 9000 B.C. , showing that a large part of each year's young were killed for food and skins. Goats, which also provided milk, soon followed; and pigs, horned cattle, and hornless cattle were next to be domesticated.
     
    In every instance, the domestication began in the Near East.
     
    The abrupt change in the course of human events that occurred circa 11,000 B.C. in the Near East (and some 2,000 years later in Europe) has led scholars to describe that time as the clear end of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) and the beginning of a new cultural era, the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic).
     
    The name is appropriate only if one considers Man's principal raw material-which continued to be stone. His dwellings in the mountainous areas were still built of stone; his communities were protected by stone walls; his first agricultural implement—the sickle—was made of stone. He honored or protected his dead by covering and adorning their graves with stones; and he used stone to make images of the supreme beings, or "gods," whose benign intervention he sought. One such image, found in northern Israel and dated to the ninth millennium B.C. , shows the carved head of a "god" shielded by a striped helmet and wearing some kind of "goggles." (Fig. 3)
     
    From an overall point of view, however, it would be more appropriate to call the age that began circa 11,000 B.C. not the Middle Stone Age but the Age of Domestication. Within the span of a mere 3,600 years—overnight in terms of the endless beginning—Man became a farmer, and wild plants and animals were domesticated. Then, a new age clearly followed. Our scholars call it the New Stone Age (Neolithic); but the term is totally inadequate, for the main change that had taken place circa 7500 B.C. was the appearance of pottery.
     

     
    Fig. 3
     
    For reasons that still elude our scholars—but which will become clear as we unfold our tale of prehistoric events—Man's march toward civilization was confined, for the first several millennia after 11,000 B.C. , to the highlands of the Near East. The discovery of the many uses to which clay could be put was contemporary with Man's descent from his mountain abodes toward the lower, mud-filled valleys.
     
    By the seventh millennium B.C. , the Near Eastern arc of civilization was teeming with clay or pottery cultures, which produced great numbers