Pastoralism and the origins of agriculture
When considering the origins of farming, and the domestication of both plants and animals, it is striking that plant domestication and cereal agriculture tend to predate animal domestication and herding in most cases.
The three most significant centres of early agriculture are the Near East (wheat, barley), the Far East (rice, millet), and Central America (maize, beans, squash),[266] and all of these areas see plant domestication occur significantly before the exploitation of domestic animals.[267] In the Near East, agricultural ‘tell' sites continued to source their meat by hunting wild gazelle for centuries before there was a significant shift towards the herding of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs.[268] Mixed farming dominates the majority of subsistence economies throughout Eurasia from that point onwards, at least in areas with the highest population densities.[269] Pastoral societies develop within the steppes of Central Asia, the Siberian taiga, Arctic tundra, and some upland and desert zones. In Central and North America, the only significant domestic animals to be exploited were turkeys and dogs, and thus pastoralism is essentially absent throughout prehistory in that region.[270] In South America it seems likely that camelids such as llama and alpaca were domesticated around the same time as Chenopodium, in the Andes, and that those two processes were integrally linked.[271] There are a few examples where grazing animals may have been domesticated before, or independently from, plant agriculture. These include reindeer in Siberia, possibly cattle in North Africa, and maybe even horses in Central Asia. While there were events of animal domestication independent to plant agriculture, and there are regions of the world that came to depend principally upon herded livestock for their subsistence, it also seems that plant domestication tended to be first and that mixed farming regimes came to be dominant. It is important to understand why this might be, as it reveals significant differences between mixed farming and pastoralism, and helps us to better understand the needs of pastoralists.The key limiting factor for any society wishing to keep herds of grazing animals is the provision of a secure food supply to livestock. This problem can be overcome in a number of ways. The size of herds can be kept very small, such that their needs are easily satisfied by local vegetation, but this is clearly a very limiting strategy in economic terms. Larger herds can be moved around the landscape in search of good grazing, but such an extensive approach requires free access to significant expanses of land, most likely implying the availability of large territories with very low population densities. If environmental conditions permit, more intensive pasture can be maintained locally, though this, in and of itself, implies significant human modification of natural vegetation for the purposes of maintaining a pastoral economy. All of these strategies are made even more difficult to sustain if there are strong seasonal patterns to weather, such as very cold winters, particularly if there is snow cover, or periods of aridity with little plant growth.
Cereal agriculturalists, on the other hand, generate huge quantities of vegetable biomass as an automatic by-product of plant food production. Only the seeds are eaten by humans, leaving substantial quantities of straw and chaff. Straw can be used for roofing and bedding, and chaff can be burnt as fuel, but these materials are also excellent animal fodder, which can be stored for use during dry seasons or winters. It is hardly surprising that we tend to see early animal domestications occur in areas where fodder is already freely available as a by-product. From the agriculturalists' point of view, the feeding of stock allows the conversion of inedible by-products into protein and fat. The keeping of livestock not only generates more food, but also different types of food, allowing for a higher quality diet.
It also allows for the storage of that food supply; the meat will only spoil after the animal is slaughtered. Mixed farmers can also exploit lands unsuitable for plant agriculture for grazing or additional production of fodder, hence allowing further intensification of their livestock production.It is hard to overstate the importance of fodder and grazing land to herders, and this issue likely impinges heavily on many aspects of a pastoralist's life and culture, most notably on territoriality and mobility. While environment may not determine the culture of pastoralists, it is a constant and strong influence. Most ethnographically observable pastoralist cultures are located in deserts, semi-arid grasslands, uplands, tundra, or high-latitude forests. The majority of these areas are poor or non-viable in terms of large-scale cereal agriculture. The simplest explanation for this is that where cereal agriculture or mixed farming are possible, these modes of subsistence tend to be favoured above pastoralism. They are more efficient, have higher yields, and can support much larger populations. As such, even if a pastoral regime had established itself, it would likely be outcompeted in the long term. Whether high mobility is necessary in all cases or not, pastoralists require extensive territories that cannot be defended easily by force, should they appear attractive to large sedentary farming populations. In prehistory, the picture appears to be similar, with specialist pastoralism only dominating in areas where other forms of agriculture could not succeed. On the face of it, however, there appear to be a few exceptions. The forest steppes of southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan became the bread basket of the former Soviet Union, and remain major producers of wheat today, without need for irrigation, yet these zones were apparently dominated by pastoralists from the Eneolithic through to the rise of the USSR. At least part of the explanation for this lies in the need for appropriately adapted strains of cereal to survive cold winters and short growing seasons, and perhaps a lack of population pressure from surrounding regions. Yet the strength of pastoralism in this agriculturally viable zone still raises questions and warns against overly simplistic models of environmental determinism.