A History of Meat-Eating - Part 2: Traditional Agriculture

Welcome back to our series on the history of meat-eating. It's been a wild ride so far, and we've still got a long way to go!

In Part 1, we covered 7 million years of pre-human and human history. We saw how early humans found an ecological niche in scavenging for meat and bone marrow and eventually learned to become effective hunters. This facilitated the development of human communication and had profound impacts on the evolution of human anatomy. Perhaps the most notable development was our large, fatty brains. 

Humans spread to every corner of the globe and began hunting other species to extinction. With wild game growing scarce, humans turned to new ways of securing food, and agriculture was born. 

As we're about to see, this transition from wild to domesticated foods had far-reaching implications for human diets, cultures, and ecosystems. Let's begin!

NOTE: All images are AI-generated and certain artistic liberties have been taken. Images are being used to convey a general sense, not historical fact. 

11,000 years ago

Sheep and goats were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia. They provided a stable supply of meat and wool.^1,2

Hunter-gatherer societies gave way to agriculture-based communities in various regions.

Pigs were also first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent region around this time.³ They were strong candidates for domestication because they were opportunistic feeders that could thrive in diverse environments. They could eat nearly any kind of food, including agricultural by-products and food waste. They also bred prolifically, producing several litters of piglets per year. ⁴

10,000 years ago

Cattle were first domesticated in what is now Turkey and Pakistan.⁵ Their natural herd social structure made them great candidates for domestication. They began to play the critical role of turning grass and shrubs into a high-value protein that could be consumed by humans. ⁶

In Europe, a genetic mutation allowed some adult humans to keep producing lactase throughout their lives. This mutation spread rapidly and gave people a new source of calories and clean hydration in cow's milk. ⁷

Similar but independent mutations also arose in Africa, and cow's milk became a staple in many human diets. ⁸

As the last Ice Age ended, humans began practicing slash and burn agriculture. This involved burning a forest to create farmland and moving along to new ground every few years once the soil fertility had been exhausted, an approach that came at great ecological cost. ⁹

The loss of tree cover disrupted local ecosystems, and the pattern of deforestation would only accelerate with the expansion of agriculture.

Human population reached 10 million.

9,000 years ago

Chickens were first domesticated in Southeast Asia from red junglefowl. ¹⁰  They made attractive candidates for domestication because of their rapid growth cycle, which provided a consistent and renewable source of protein from both eggs and meat. ¹¹

8,000 years ago 

Humans in Europe began applying livestock manure to crop fields. This practice boosted yields while preserving soil health and preventing farmland exhaustion, allowing farmland to be maintained and passed down to successive generations. This also reduced the need to clear new land, slowing the relentless deforestation of earlier farming methods. ¹²

Early cheese-making emerged. ¹³

7,000 years ago

Animal-drawn plows were first developed in Europe. ¹⁴

With livestock becoming increasingly ubiquitous throughout human societies, global consumption of domestic animals may have surpassed the consumption of wild animals around this time. For the first time in history, humans had become more reliant on domestic livestock than on wild game.

4,000 years ago

Horses were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppe. ¹⁵ They were initially used primarily for meat and milk before they were used for riding. ¹⁶

3,000 years ago

Agriculture provided far more food per acre of land than hunting and gathering, and did not require people to live nomadic lifestyles. This combination of factors made large permanent settlements possible, and eventually led to large cities and urban ways of life. 

As civilizations grew and populations swelled, complex economies emerged, and with them more organized spiritual systems. 

With growing populations, religions began to morph from fluid spiritual practices into organized belief systems with temples, texts, hierarchies, and laws. While small groups of hunter-gatherer humans were able to maintain social cohesion through kinship and shared stories, more defined systems were necessary to scale moral codes and loyalty beyond immediate familial ties. 

As new religions were established, each prescribed various attitudes and beliefs towards meat consumption. 

In Hinduism and Buddhism, the ethical principle of "Ahimsa," meaning "nonviolence," is central. While its role in these religions differs between sects and has evolved over time, a commonly held belief is that killing animals (unless absolutely necessary) generates bad karma and is to be avoided. As such, vegetarianism is a common practice among followers. 

In Judaism, the Kashrut laws state that mammals must chew the cud and have split hooves to be "kosher," that is, satisfying the requirements of Jewish law. For example, cows and sheep are kosher whereas pigs and camels are not. Food animals must be slaughtered by a trained person in a swift and humane fashion to minimize suffering. 

In Christianity, there was an early question as to whether or not Christians should follow Jewish dietary law. It was ultimately decided that they should not, marking a theological shift towards salvation through faith, not law. 

In Islam, the Qur'an outlines what is "halal," or permissible. It shares much in common with Judaism, and both aim to foster mindfulness, discipline, and reverence when eating meat. ¹⁷

Human population reached 100 million. 

2,500 years ago

With the rise of agriculture, diets based on just a few domesticated crops became the norm. The average human lifespan fell, infant mortality increased, and the rate of nutritional deficiencies and related diseases soared. ¹⁸

The repetitive motions required for farm work were also much harder on human bodies than the more generalized movements of hunting and gathering. Overuse injuries and chronic pain became common. ¹⁹

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who is now considered the father of ethical vegetarianism, promoted a plant-based diet or "Pythagorean" diet around this time. ²⁰

1,500 years ago

Expanding trade routes spread camels, sheep, goats, and salted meats to new parts of the globe. ²¹

1,100 years ago

Humans began using firearms to hunt animals in China. ²²

530 years ago

Columbus’ voyage paved the way for European colonization of the Americas. Farm animals were brought to the new world. Because land for livestock was abundant, per capita meat consumption was much higher in the new world than in Europe. ²³

More than 30 million American Buffalo roamed the great plains of North America. ²⁴  

Human population reached 500 million. 

215 years ago

The practice of feeding grain to cattle began in America. This shortened the time it took to get cattle to market weight and produced beef that had more fat and less flavor variation, but at the cost of nutritional composition. ²⁵ 

Human population reached 1 billion. 

200 years ago

The Industrial Revolution transformed economies across the globe. 

Advances in transportation (such as railroads) and refrigeration began to change how meat was produced and distributed. Meat could now be shipped cheaply over long distances. ²⁶

The cost of meat began to decline in industrialized nations, making it more affordable for the middle class. ²⁷

160 years ago

Cattle became the most numerous large herbivores in the U.S., symbolizing the triumph of animal husbandry over hunting as the American way of life. Over the next few decades, the population of American Buffalo would be reduced to under 1,000 due to excessive overhunting. ²⁸

130 years ago

The term “factory farm” was used for the first time to describe raising animals with an industrial mindset to increase speed, profit, and efficiency. ²⁹

Shortly thereafter, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was published. The novel exposed the unsanitary conditions of the American meat-packing industry and led to sanitation reforms including the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. ³⁰

100 years ago

The first indoor broiler chicken farm was established in the U.S. For the first time, chickens were raised entirely indoors.³¹ This lowered the cost of production, but at the expense of animal welfare and nutritional composition. ³²

Human population reached 2 billion. 

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This time we covered just 12,000 years (about .1% of the time we covered in Part 1,) but life on earth already looks radically different since the agricultural revolution.

In this short time, human population soared from 5 million to 2 billion. If those numbers are hard to grasp, here's a graph to put it into perspective:

For much of this period, population growth was limited by food supply. But as agriculture became more efficient and the relative cost of food dropped, population growth accelerated dramatically.

Animal husbandry goes back to the very beginning of agriculture, even predating the cultivation of crops. Livestock helped us extract more nutrients from the land, and their importance deepened when we learned to apply their manure to cropland, which made it possible to produce crops in the same soil sustainably year after year. 

These mixed crop-livestock systems enabled the transition to permanent farming communities. Food availability increased, but dietary diversity and health outcomes declined compared to our foraging ancestors. As humans expanded their footprint across the globe, forests fell to the plow, and many wild species such as the American Buffalo were displaced or exterminated altogether.

Over millennia, our nomadic past living off wild game faded from memory and 'meat' came to mean primarily the flesh of a small number of domesticated species. While it was once a precious and labor-intensive food, by 100 years ago it was already well on its way to becoming a mass-produced commodity. We'll explore the rapid industrialization of animal husbandry over the past 100 years in Part 3. See you there!

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References

1. The Goat Domestication process Inferred from Large-Scale Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of Wild and Domestic Individuals. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10...
2. Revealing the History of Sheep Domestication Using Retrovirus Integrations. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...
3. Revisiting the Evolutionary History of Pigs via De Novo Mutation Rate Estimation in A Three-generation Pedigree. https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
4. The Archaeology of Pig Domestication in Eurasia. https://link.springer.com/arti...
5. New World Cattle Show Ancestry From Multiple Independent Domestication Events. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10...
6. Domestication of Cattle: Two or Three Events? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co...
7. The Origins of Lactase Persistence in Europe. https://journals.plos.org/plos...
8. Convergent Adaptation of Human Lactase Persistence in Africa and Europe. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...
9. How to Highlight Slash-and-Burn Agriculture in Ancient Soils? A Modern Baseline of Agrarian Fire Imprint in the Guatemalan Lowlands Using Charcoal Particle Analysis. https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
10. 863 Genomes Reveal the Origin and Domestication of Chicken. https://www.nature.com/article...
11. Earliest Economic Exploitation of Chicken Outside East Asia. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2...
12. Manure Used by Europe's First Farmers 8,000 Years Ago. https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
13. Earliest Evidence for Cheese Making in the Sixth Millennium BC in Northern Europe. https://www.nature.com/article...
14. New Evidence for Prehistoric Ploughing in Europe. https://www.nature.com/article...
15. The Origins and Spread of Domestic Horses from the Western Eurasian Steppes. https://www.nature.com/article...
16. Domestication and Early History of the Horse. https://www.scribd.com/documen...
17. Religious Dietary Laws. https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
18. Life History Transitions at the Origins of Agriculture: A Model for Understanding How Niche Construction Impacts Human Growth, Demography and Health. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...
19. Ergonomic Risks and Musculoskeletal Disorders in Production Agriculture. https://gpcah.public-health.ui...
20. Vegetarian Nutrition: Past, Present, Future. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...
21. Trans-Saharan Trade. https://oxfordre.com/africanhi...
22. History of the Firearm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
23. The Columbian Exchange. https://scholar.harvard.edu/fi...
24. Early Human-Bison Population Interdependence in the Plains Ecosystem. https://www.proquest.com/docvi...
25. A Review of Fatty Acid Profiles and Antioxidant Content in Grass-fed and Grain-fed Beef. https://nutritionj.biomedcentr...
26. Nature's Metropolis. https://wwnorton.com/books/Nat...
27. Meat Consumption and Trade in Historical Perspective. https://zaguan.unizar.es/recor...
28. The Destruction of the Bison. https://www.cambridge.org/core...
29. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j...
30. The Jungle. https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo...
31. Commercial Chicken Meat and Egg Production. https://link.springer.com/book...
32. Pasture and Feed Affect Broiler Carcass Nutrition. https://cdn.wildapricot.com/23...

About the Author
Grant Jones grew up on the Olympic Peninsula and studied English Literature & Philosophy at the University of Washington. He operates Hungry Hollow Farm, a regenerative farm producing pastured meat, eggs, honey, and no-till veggies. In 2023, he co-founded Mt. Joy, the first fried chicken restaurant in the U.S. to source chicken exclusively from pasture farms instead of factory farms.