History of Cattle
The Mediterranean and Western Asia are neither of them good places for cows. They are too dry, and there is not enough grass. Both places are better suited for sheep. Cattle, however, are needed for plowing. So some cows, though not very many, are raised in Asia and Africa.
Ancient Egyptian cattle plowing (Louvre Museum, Paris)
You can see a model of an Egyptian man
plowing with oxen here. South of the Sahara
desert, a lot of people kept cattle also. Cattle were very important
to the Afro-Asiatic people south
of Egypt and across the Sudan,and they were also very important to the KhoiKhoi
in South Africa. None of these people used cattle to farm; instead, they
ate their meat and drank their milk.
Further to the north-east, however, in the plains of central Russia and
Siberia, there is lots of grassland, and there are lots of cows. Many invaders
of the Mediterranean and southern
Asia were cattle ranchers from the grasslands.
North of the Mediterranean, in Europe and Britain, there is more pasture,
and there were more cattle, although until the later
middle ages the whole area was so thickly forested that perhaps there
were not very many cows.
In India, people also used cows and water buffalo for plowing and for milk and yogurt, but they didn't eat them because Hindus believed cows were sacred.
Oxen from Tang Dynasty China
In China, people also plowed with oxen. In Northern China they used the same oxen as in West Asia, and in Southern China they used water buffalo, as people did in India.
In North America, people did not use domesticated (tame) cattle for plowing, but they did hunt and eat wild cattle called buffalo or bison. When people from Europe came to America, about 1600 AD, they brought their domesticated (tame) cattle with them, and by the 1800's AD there were many oxen plowing fields in both North and South America, and many more grazing on the pastures of the American plains, being herded by cowboys, replacing the buffalo which people had mostly killed.
To find out more about cattle, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your local library:
Cattle, by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent (1993). For kids.
Cows, by Sara Swan Miller (2000). Also for kids. Only deals with dairy cows, so you don't have to confront the fact that people kill cows and eat them. There is a bit on Indian sacred cows, though.
A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals, by Juliet Clutton-Brock (2nd edition 1999). Mainly deals with how cattle (and other animals) got tamed, so people could raise them. Not especially for kids.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond (1999). For adults. Diamond makes an interesting argument that people in Europe and Asia are wealthier than people in Africa and the Americas mainly because they had environmental advantages, including cattle.
