About 2,000,000 years ago, early humans hadn't figured out farming yet.
So, they mainly relied on collecting fruits, tree bark, tree roots, and even insects to survive.
As did several other hominid species, including one called australopithecus.
But around this time, a change began to happen - not among the humans, but the climate.
An Ice Age was beginning, and for many humans, long portions of the year were marked by cold temperatures and food shortages.
To overcome this obstacle, the solution australopithecus came up with
was to eat a higher quantity of lower quality plants, like weeds and grasses.
While homo sapiens - that's us - found that in times of scarcity, animal meat and bone marrow could supplement fruits.
And actually provided greater amounts of protein, and access to different important nutrients, that only a few plants could provide.
If you look around today, only one of us is still around, as australopithecus died out around 2,000,000 years ago.
And it's thought, that their different feeding habits influenced their eventual demise.
In this way, eating meat helped save humans from extinction.
Ever since then, humans have been hunting and eating animals to satisfy parts of their diet.
And eventually figured out, that if we captured some of their young, and raised them alongside us,
we didn't have to put ourselves in danger, and could have our reliable source of food.
This process of training and breeding animals to coexist with humans, is called domestication.
And any animal we raise for the purpose of eating, or deriving some other value out of,
like for their eggs, milk or leather, is called livestock.
And although today, many of these are found all over the world, each one had to have come from somewhere specific.
And each one has an interesting story behind their domestication.
So, let's get the big one out of the way first: chickens.
The term "chicken" actually used to mean just the young ones, while the term "fowl" was used for the whole species.
That's why we still call all young birds chicks, even if they aren't chickens.
Honestly, I could do a whole video about chickens, so I hope you're ready for this.
Modern-day chickens are the domesticated form of what's called the "red junglefowl",
a bird, that struts along the floor of tropical forests, scratching seeds and other foods out of the soil.
In the wild, the red junglefowl originated over an area, stretching from India into China,
and down into southeast Asia, making it all the way to Sumatra.
And to this day, there are still wild populations of junglefowl throughout this area.
Although out of the red junglefowl's initial range, the earliest definitive evidence of chicken domestication
comes out of Hebei province in China, and would have occurred around 7,400 years ago.
From China, the domesticated chicken quickly spread east [*west],
with evidence of domesticated chickens in India from around 7,000 years ago.
By around 5,000 years ago they made it to Anatolia, and into eastern Europe not long after.
Evidence of chickens in the Middle East only go back to 4,000 years,
and they only reached Egypt around 3,400 years ago (or by about 1400 BCE).
The shocking part about all this, however, is that the chicken had not been domesticated for farming or even consumption yet.
Instead, this entire time, or for the first 5,000 years after chickens were first domesticated,
they were being used for the sole purpose of cock fighting, both as entertainment as well as gambling.
The first evidence we have, of people actually farming and eating chickens,
comes from only 2,300 years ago, in the ancient Israeli city of Maresha.
It was here, that a tremendous collection of over 1,000 chicken bones were found.
These bones were mostly from female chickens, so they couldn't have been used for cock fighting.
There were many fully matured bones, so they weren't selectively killed at birth.
And most importantly, the bones bare markings from knives, indicating that they were being cooked and cut up.
With 19 billions total chickens alive today on Earth, grown solely for their meat,
I think it's safe to say we use them more for eating than gambling now.
And our domestication of the chicken has made it the most populous bird on the planet,
with 2.5 chickens for every human on Earth.
Okay, I think I'm about done with chickens.
Cows, which also go by the name "cattle", are actually older than domesticated chickens.
And they can trace their wild heritage back to a beast knows as "auroch", which has since gone extinct.
But we still know what they look like, because they're one of the most common images to have been recorded as cave paintings.
Yeah, they look a lot like cows, that's kinda the point.
These were an incredibly versatile animal, they really only needed grass to survive.
Because of this, they basically originated anywhere with grass,
and their range spreads all the way from western Europe, through Asia, all the way to China.
DNA analysis, however, indicates that the domesticated cow we're familiar with today,
likely originated from just around 80 aurochs, near the villages of Çaöynü Tepesi in modern-day Turkey.
Maybe even by a single group of people, which is really crazy if you think about it.
Cows, that came out of this domestication event, are called taurine cows,
and sometimes mistakenly called European cows.
A second domestication event happened, however, which resulted in indicine cows.
Which, if you couldn't tell by the name, happened near the banks of the Indus river, in modern-day Pakistan.
These look notably different from most cows we're used to, featuring, among other things, a large hump on their back.
Instead of cows, these can also be called "zebu", and not everyone agrees, that they should be considered the same as cows.
But at least, genetically speaking, they're essentially the same animal.
Cows are also thought to be one of the oldest forms of currency.
And if we still used them, India would be the richest country on Earth,
hosting over 300 million of them, or roughly 30% of the world cow population.
And Brazil would be second with 232 million, or 23% of all the cows.
And yet, YouTube refuses to pay me in cows, and Patreon doesn't even let me make a choice to receive donations in cows.
"Pig" also used to be the word for a young pig, while the word "swine" was used for the whole species.
Which means, some day "piglet" could come to mean an adult pig,
and then we would need to find a new word, probably something like "piggle" for their babies.
The swine as a whole, however, are the domesticated version of the Eurasian boar.
Which as the name implies, also kinda has a ginormous range, throughout Europe and Asia.
But it's thought, more anciently, they originated out of southeast Asia, around 2,000,000 years ago.
However, they were domesticated in more or less the same exact place as cows,
within the Tigris river basin, likely south-central Turkey as well.
Since Turkey seems so be very popular so far, let's talk about turkeys next.
I was surprised to find, that turkeys actually did get their name from the country Turkey, but maybe not in the way you'd expect.
You see, wild turkeys had an original range across north America, nowhere near the country of Turkey.
Most likely, originating in the warm pine forest of Mexico.
But upon finding America, Europeans realized just how much they liked them, and brought them back to the Old World.
Quickly, turkeys made they way to the Ottoman Empire, which excelled in the trade of a very similar bird - the guineafowl.
The Turkish people came to breed and further domesticate the bird,
and began distributing it throughout the Mediterranean, and all the way back to Britain.
From there, the bird became associated with those who traded the bird,
and they became Turkish birds, birds from Turkey, and eventually just turkeys.
I guess the Turkish just really loved domesticating animals.
Moving on to sheep, like all of these, sheep had a more wild ancestor called the "mouflon".
From which, modern domesticated sheep were bred from.
These guys looked a thousand times cooler than moder sheep, and I definitely want to ride one.
The original range of mouflons was from the Caucasus, into... yeah, Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, and down into Iraq and Iran.
They were one of the first domesticated animals, when 11,000 years ago the Mesopotamians domesticated them.
Though it's unclear, where exactly in Mesopotamia this happened, who are we kidding? It was probably Turkey.
Goats are very similar to sheep, so it only makes sense,
that they come from roughly the same place, and were domesticated at roughly the same time.
Except domestic goats likely came from the wild bezoar ibex, which has some serious horns.
And actually have the largest horns relative to body size, of any animal on Earth.
These have a range from the Zagros mountains, into... yeah, Turkey, and the Caucasus as well.
The term to refer to a baby or a young goat, is just "kid", so this is just a bunch of kids.
This phrase comes from England, and is actually older than referring to human children as "kids",
which originated in America during the 1800s.
So yeah, basically calling a child a "kid", means you're calling them a baby goat.
Horses are probably the most awesome of the animals that we eat,
and also help in finally getting us out of Mesopotamia.
They likely roamed the pontic steppe, from Ukraine through Russia, and all the way into Kazachstan.
And it was here, that they were also likely domesticated, around 6,000 years ago.
The earliest irrefutable evidence of horse domestication comes from sites shared between Russia and Kazachstan,
where the horse carcasses were found, buried with chariots,
clearly indicated they were being used, and had been for some time.
A very close relative of the horse is the donkey, which yeah, are also called "ass".
And a female donkey, now called the "jenny", was just called the "she-ass".
I'm telling you all this not because it's important, but because I have to have funk making these videos too.
Despite being close relatives to the horse, they originated from the African wild ass,
which had a range from Egypt, all the way down to the Horn of Africa, as far as Somalia.
However, this region used to be a lot more grassy, and now their true range is centered around Ethiopia.
But this original range explains, why the donkey was originally domesticated in a place
called Nubia, by pastoral people in modern-day Sudan.
Camels are kind of difficult, because there's really two different camels:
The dromedary, what most of us consider as a regular camel, and then the bactrian camel.
Dromedaries, also known as Arabian camels, are just that,
originating in Arabia, and spilling over a bit into north and east Africa.
And it was either here in Arabia, or in Somalia, that they were first domesticated.
Whereas bactiran camels come from, well... Bactria.
Which is roughly this area, mostly in modern-say Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Because of their original habitat, it was these types of camels, the bactiran ones, that were used for the Silk Road.
Closely related to camels, are llamas and alpacas.
Because of their similarities to each other, they're often confused, but they are in fact different animals.
The important difference between them is size, as llamas can be up to 6 feet [1.8 meters] tall,
whereas alpacas are smaller, typically only over 4 feet [1.2 meters] tall.
The range of the llama is also bigger, stretching from Ecuador down to Chile, and even Argentina;
while alpacas can mostly be found within southern Peru and northern Chile.
But basically, both can be found within the Andes, and they're sort of just used as the cows of the Andes mountains.
If that's the case, then the cows of the Himalaya mountains would be yaks.
Which are basically cows, that grow their own skirts, as they've become adapted for cold and mountainous regions.
The most important difference between cows and yaks, however - in my opinion at least - is that while cows moo, yaks grunt.
And even their Latin name, "bos grunniens", reflects this, translating into "bull grunting".
The last two livestock creatures I want to talk about, aren't often thought about.
Typically, we don't directly eat these, but instead we just use the products they create.
The first one is the silkworm.
These are the larval stage of the silkmoth, which produce... yeah, you guessed it, silk.
The wild silkmoth has a range starting in northern India, and coming all the way up into northern China, and even into far-eastern Russia.
Domestication occurred in China, roughly 5,000 years ago.
And then the secret of their domestication was closely guarded, when outsiders came.
And Europeans had to steal silkworms, in order to figure it out.
It's a very interesting story, but we don't have time for it right now.
Lastly, we have the honey bee.
Now, some might argue this doesn't count as a domesticated livestock,
but they're still an animal, that we derive a tremendous amount of value from,
both through their honey and wax, but especially through their pollination practices.
So I figured I'd include them regardless.
Of the 20,000 different bee species, that exist on Earth, only 7 produce honey.
And it's thought, that the first honey bees came from Africa, and spread naturally across the rest of Eurasia.
And today, the most popular one is called the western honeybee, or sometimes, the European honeybee (hint hint).
And because Europeans had a lot of fun, sailing all around the world, and meeting a bunch of new people,
and definitely didn't do anything bad in any of these places - the modern range of the western honeybee looks like this.
Although they likely originated closer to this area, cave paintings in both Spain and France
have been found, depicting humans collecting honey from bee hives,
the first evidence of actual domestication comes from Egypt.
Where tombs have been found with images of beekeeping, from around 9,000 years ago.
Which is crazy, because beekeeping suits wouldn't be around for another 7,500 years.
They were only invented in the 1500s.
So yeah, for over 7,000 years people took care of bees, with nothing or close to nothing.
Which, I like honey and all, but overall doesn't seem worth it.
That's about it for livestock. Let me know, if you'd like to see another video,
maybe about our grains, vegetables, or possibly even peta.
As always, Thank You to my patrons for helping make this video and this channel possible.
If you wanna get your name up here, like these generous people, I got a link coming up for you.
Of course, you should subscribe if you like this, and if you haven't yet,
maybe you should check out my videos on where spices and fruits came from.
I'll be back soon with another one, thanks.