THE ERA OF INCIPIENT CULTIVATION AND ANIMAL DOMESTICATION
I said above ([p. 105]) that my era of incipient cultivation and animal domestication is mainly set up by playing a hunch. Although we cannot really demonstrate it—and certainly not in the Near East—it would be very strange for food-collectors not to have known a great deal about the plants and animals most useful to them. They do seem to have domesticated the dog. We can easily imagine them remembering to go back, season after season, to a particular patch of ground where seeds or acorns or berries grew particularly well. Most human beings, unless they are extremely hungry, are attracted to baby animals, and many wild pups or fawns or piglets must have been brought back alive by hunting parties.
In this last sense, man has probably always been an incipient cultivator and domesticator. But I believe that Adams is right in suggesting that this would be doubly true with the experimenters of the terminal era of food-collecting. We noticed that they also seem to have had a tendency to settle down. Now my hunch goes that when this experimentation and settling down took place within a potential nuclear area—where a whole constellation of plants and animals possible of domestication was available—the change was easily made. Professor Charles A. Reed, our field colleague in zoology, agrees that year-round settlement with plant domestication probably came before there were important animal domestications.