326 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1934 



their families from the wild animals and, when necessary, kill them 

 for food. Their life was one of continual wandering, remaining in 

 any one place only so long as the hunting and fishing continued 

 plentiful, and temporarily living in the mouths of caves. Such 

 was man's existence for mellennia, but, as in the case of his ancestors, 

 he continued to develop by imperceptible degrees, both in ptiysical 

 and mental make-up. In fact, whole races of man disappeared, 

 and others took their places on the earth, and each successive race 

 was superior to the last. 



Man's staple food 10,000 years ago was fresh meat, and from his 

 long association with animals he had acquired a fund of knowledge 

 of their habits and ways, which he cunningly applied in hunting 

 them. His stone weapons were best suited for hunting in the open 

 country, and he quite naturally came to know best the animals rang- 

 ing the grassy terrains, such as pigs, sheep, oxen, and horses. 

 Through following the herds on their seasonal migrations and occa- 

 sionally capturing and tending stray animals, man acquired addi- 

 tional knowledge of the various breeds and gradually became a cattle 

 herder and breeder. In this way each successive generation of ani- 

 mals became more tame and accustomed to man, and by about 6,000 

 B. C. many of the grass-eating varieties were about ready for com- 

 plete domestication. This came about by slow degrees in the subse- 

 quent centuries, with man at the same time gradually changing from 

 a nomadic hunter and herder to a settled agriculturist with horses 

 and cattle to help till the soil. Anthropologists are generally of the 

 opinion that this great change in man's life took place in the interior 

 of Asia, for somewhere in this region was the cradleland of the 

 human race. It might have been in the plains area east of the Cas- 

 pian Sea, where grasslands abound and where horses and cattle would 

 naturally congregate. 



As a settled, peaceful farmer with a lessened struggle for subsis- 

 tence and more time to think, man was bound to develop new ideas 

 such as ways of making better-edged tools, skinning and curing hides, 

 sewing garments, and making ornaments, and there is no doubt that 

 some fellow tried experiments with his trained animals such as tying 

 a pack on a dog's or a horse's back. When this was successfully 

 accomplished, one can easily imagine the confidence with which some 

 other chap attempted the next obvious step — that of riding the ani- 

 mals. He succeeded in this, too, first on oxen and donkeys, about 

 7,000 years ago, and in doing it he provided the first real medium of 

 transportation. It was on horseback and in ox teams that the hordes 

 of Huns — the last of the great migrations — invaded and overran 

 Europe. In the ages which followed, many kinds of animals, guch as 

 the camel and the elephant, were trained both as burden bearers and 



