Ten or eleven thousand years ago, a hunting party heard a strange bleating sound. It was unlikely to be familiar: the wild sheep they had been stalking were not only shy, but spent most of their time high in the mountains on rocky terrain on which humans were not too comfortable.
Realizing that what they heard was an injured animal, they crept towards it quietly, thinking, ‘Here’s an easy meal.’ Moments later, they found themselves staring at a suffering, pregnant sheep. At first, they were going to put the animal out of its misery on the spot, but they soon had the idea of bringing it to camp and nursing it back to health – and why not? If the sheep gave birth, they would save themselves another hunt; if it died, they would still have an animal’s worth of meat. They took the poor sheep back and soon they had it and a couple of baby ones as well. Those hunters were the proud owners of the first domestic lambs.
Once those lambs were born, the hunters saw a wholly different animal. Docile, and almost obedient, they were easy to keep and formed herds that would stay together without much pressure from the outside. The only problem was breeding those first lambs in captivity. Should they capture more animals for diversity’s sake or just mate brothers and sisters?
Domesticating and breeding sheep – indeed, growing versus gathering anything – would have been a decision more than a discovery. Certainly, our ancestors knew how both plants and animals reproduced long before they themselves attempted to control the process. So there could have been another scenario: one day, a group of hunters chased a female sheep and cornered her. While it was their habit to go in for the kill, this time they decided to bring her home alive. With a bit more effort, they could capture a live male, too, and if they put the two together, they could have more sheep without needing to hunt. Certainly it would be more efficient if they captured some live sheep, allowed them to breed and reaped the harvest, rather than hunting and killing the animals one at a time.
Whatever the earliest domesticators did, we have to wonder what they were thinking. Did they expect to keep just a few animals? Did they imagine a large herd? Did they build a pen first? Could they have guessed that a whole new profession would spring up around sheep raising? And did they have any inkling of how to get formerly wild animals to mate? Captive breeding might not have worked the first time, but sheep are not all that difficult to mate and success may have come fairly quickly.
And did they already know about lamb as a food? Had they noticed that the meat of smaller, younger animals had better flavour and was more tender? Our hunters had no way of recording their opinions. They existed thousands of years before the first recipes or cookbooks – indeed, thousands of years before the first written words.
As well as being hunters, they were certainly gatherers. There’s plenty of evidence that they ate grains, though none that tells us if they gathered grains or grew them. The archaeological record shows that people developed farming methods and domesticated sheep during roughly the same era and in pretty much the same place – but it does not tell us which happened first. It appears that this added up to a culture that ate a balanced diet of meats, grains and vegetables, but was only just learning how to produce and preserve it; nobody really knows if it happened exactly that way or not, but somehow, someone managed to domesticate sheep and make the move from hunter to farmer. First, a steady supply of meat and then, after they got to know the animals better, the farmers started making thread, rope and bowstrings from the sinews, the hair became wool and the skin first became hides, then leather and parchment. Even the fat was useful: it could be made into a balm for healing or tallow for candles. With a bit more effort and some creative combining, you can create food, medicine, clothing, shoes, containers, rugs and tents from sheep.
These domesticated sheep were tame enough to be milked and, with that, there was a beverage, followed by yogurt and cheese. In one way, these early sheep were even easier than our own today: they did not need shearing. Ancient breeds of sheep shed their outer coats of fine fibre twice a year. And there was more to be had: the horns made fine drinking vessels and musical instruments too. All you had to do was lead a sheep to a patch of grass. It was enough to lift us out of the Stone Age, and made hunting and gathering look just a bit oldfashioned.
Sheep did not come with an instruction book. It was not until they were kept in captivity that somebody thought of collecting the woollen fibres while the animals were alive, rather than just wearing their hairy skins, removed whole from the dead animal. And there was one act that required a different sort of courage: who was the first person to drink a sheep’s milk? Every detail of their raising and harvesting had to be figured out by probably painful trial and error, including the big question: for maximum flavour, texture and economy, when do you slaughter the animals?
The older, adult wild sheep that those hunter-gatherers caught were full of flavour, but they were also hard to find and the meat tough to chew. The animals they raised themselves turned out to be a different story: milder, more tender and, eventually, happy to reproduce under the watchful eyes of shepherds – an entirely new occupation that sprang up as sheep husbandry took root.
It was not such a bad deal for the sheep, either. In the care of humans, they could thrive in a way they could not in the wild. Their wounds and illnesses were nursed and they were led to the best grazing land. Shepherds and dogs did a pretty good job of protecting them from predators, too. Some sheep may have returned to the wild, but for the most part it seems they embraced their new role as the world’s first farm animals.
We might still be guessing about how the first sheep were domesticated, but it is pretty certain where it took place: in the Zagros Mountains of Iran. With peaks in the range of 4,300 m (14,000ft) high, the Zagros can be thought of as an arid version of the Rockies or the Alps. They provided the sort of rough terrain and patchy grass that both sheep and shepherds love.
With a steady supply of both wild and domesticated sheep to learn from, those early herdsmen started to study what they had. We all know the basics: sheep have four legs and a hairy coat and make a distinctive ‘baa’ sound. The farmers also knew that sheep could grow big and strong eating nothing but grass. Clearly, they were quite different from dogs – the only other animal they kept; sheep did not try to be friendly with humans or help in the way dogs did – they just went about their business, producing meat, milk and wool.
Unlike dogs, sheep did not compete with people for food at all. Dogs may have begged for food, but sheep keep to themselves. Indeed, all an early farmer would have needed to raise sheep was a bit of patchy grassland. And when the grass was finished, the animals just moved on to... well ... greener pastures. Sheep were such good harvesters that early examples of the first agricultural tool, the sickle, resembled a sheep’s jaws, with tiny blades placed like teeth. It was the first – but not the last – time that sheep acted as a model.
Back then, sheep comprised practically the whole farm; their flesh, milk, hides, sinews and horns were the only animal agricultural products that existed. When it came to crops like barley and wheat, sheep did their part too, by providing fertilizer. It was official: Ovis aries, the sheep, of mountain crags, pastures and parent of the lamb, had been domesticated.
Today, regulatory bodies such as the European Union and the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proffer strict definitions of ‘lamb’ and ‘mutton’; indeed, some countries even include an in-between category called ‘hog - get’, for sheep too old to be called ‘lamb’ and too young to be ‘mutton’. This has not always been the case. Although those first shepherds in Larsa, Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), may have slaughtered their lambs when they were one year old, the age prescribed by the FDA, the rest of history shows far less consistency in the matter. Sometimes we see clues: one hist o rical record might describe a meal that consisted of a whole roast lamb that provided enough meat for only four people, while another source describes a lamb that fed twenty.
Then again, some farm and kitchen records detail the ages and weights of slaughtered animals with the greatest precision. And there are times when we just do not know if an original recipe was for what would today be an adult sheep or a baby lamb.
There would be no lamb without sheep; and, for the most part, ‘lamb’ refers to our modern way of eating them. Though there are some people who go for mutton, the flesh of grown-up sheep, the meat of young animals – as lamb chops, lamb shanks, leg of lamb or lamb shoulder, and maybe a bit of minced lamb – tends to be how we eat sheep today.
By Brian Yarvin in " Lamb - A Global History", The Edible Series, Reakton Books, London, 2015, excerpts pp.12-20. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.