Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c10.7

c10.7

We do not know whether the most ancient agriculture went side by side with domestication of animals: the two elements in mixed farming may have two different origins, grain-growing from the food gatherers (perhaps mainly the women of the tribe), and domestication from the hunters, who had already tamed the dog - and indeed grain might have been grown first of all to provide food to induce wild animals to come under subjection. But in just the same regions as those in which the ‘noble’ grasses grow wild, can the wild ancestors of sheep, goats, and cattle be identified. With the wild sheep this is particularly clear, with the Mouflon distributed from the Mediterranean through Asia Minor to Persia, the Urial from Persia, Turkestan and Afghanistan to the Punjab and Baluchistan, and the Argal eastwards of this again. It cannot have been long before grain-growing and stock-breeding, even if differing in origins, became combined in one distinctive economy; and man had become a mixed farmer.