1 8 DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS 



are often found buried with human remains, as would be hkely 

 with special favorites. In those days, of course, animals were 

 not yet domesticated for food, but only to assist in the hunt, an 

 inference perfectly safe from the fact that most of the remains 

 in the middens are of deer and reindeer, even yet not domesti- 

 cated.i In all these various ways the history of domestication of ' 

 many if not most of our animals is well known, if not in detail^ 

 at least in a general way. |l 



Not always able to identify the original. However this may 

 be, and however confident we may feel as to the processes of 

 domestication, we often cannot speak with assurance of the 

 exact wild species from which each particular domestic animal 

 has been developed. We know that the ancestor was a wild 

 animal, but which one or ones of the many similar races that 

 must have existed in those remote times we have but scanty 

 means of knowing. 



This is partly because, through breeding and care, all domes- 

 ticated races have been greatly changed from their appearance 

 in the wild state, and partly because in very many cases the wild 

 original may itself have changed, or even, perhaps, long ceased 

 to exist anywhere on earth ; indeed, it looks sometimes as if 

 domestication had been the principal if not the only means of 

 saving some of our most valuable species from utter extinction 

 long ago. 



Distinction between feral and wild. Until recent years im-i 

 mense numbers of so-called wild cattle, and of wild horses as 

 well, roamed over our own western plains and over the pampas 

 of South America. Such animals are not truly wild, because 

 they do not represent an original stock, being merely the de- 

 scendants of the cattle and horses brought over by the Spanish 

 invaders, some of which escaped and '' ran wild." Finding 

 conditions favorable, such escaped specimens throve and freely 

 multiplied, ultimately stocking the plains with roving bands of 



1 This statement may be questionable as to the reindeer, which is now 

 semidomesticated. 



