Page 7 - Breeding Edge ebook

Europeans’ arrival have been identified, including popcorns, flint varieties, and others for uses such as
making chicha beer and textile dyes.

Corn was used in what is now the U.S. Southwest by about 1200 B.C. and, by the first century, the crop
joined eastern North American natives’ other established foods such as pumpkin and sunflowers.

As with their crops, farmers around the world also selectively bred animals, adapting them to their needs
for food and clothing and breeding them to flourish in new climates when, for example, they migrated to
the Americas and Australia and brought cattle to those continents.

Hirst points out that farming migration in early agriculture was extremely slow. “People traveled much
more slowly in the past – a person can travel about 12 miles in a day, and less than that if driving
animals. So selective breeding was a very slow process” as
groups “would move into drier climates or less ideal
environments or respond to climate changes as they themselves
ranged hither and yon. You would bring your goats with you
and the ones that lived the longest or continued producing milk
the longest would be, by definition, the ones that survived.”
Initially, today’s hot- and cold-climate cattle breeds all began as
aurochs (now extinct) in Europe and the Near East. Beginning
about 10,000 years ago, they were domesticated and bred for
mankind’s purposes across Europe and parts of southern Asia
and northern Africa.

She said evidence for selective farm animal breeding in pre-
history was apparently not, for example, focused on the biggest,
toughest bulls or rams to protect the herd. Actually, she said, Archeologist Kris Hirst
scholars believe most sought-after characteristics were those in
animals that could adapt to living close to humans. “Domestication,” Hirst said, “is always associated
with getting smaller, calmer, sweeter-tempered animals, who didn’t mind being milked and were
disinclined to attack the humans or wander off.”

Cross breeding catches on in the 20th century

Although Gregor Johann Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian abbot in Brno, Moravia (now in the Czech
Republic), became hailed in the 20th century as the father of modern genetics, the long-delayed
acceptance of his discoveries reflects the very slow pace of plant and animal breeding advances through
most of human history.

He tested some 28,000 pea and other plants to learn about hybridization and demonstrate the dominant
and recessive traits in evidence as a result of crossbreeding. He also experimented with breeding mice
and bees. He was not alone. Other naturalists and farmers experimented with cross breeding plants in the
late 19th Century as well, but the concept did not catch on.

So Mendel’s meetings with the Natural History Society in Brno in 1865 and his now-famous paper,
Experiments on Plant Hybridization in 1866 were soon after ignored until the start of the next century,
many years after his death.

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