The secondary products revolution
Animals stop being only meat and start being milk, wool, traction and transport.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 700 years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
From around 4000 BCE, livestock are increasingly exploited for products that renew rather than requiring slaughter: milk, wool, dung, and pulling power. Andrew Sherratt named the shift, and residue analysis of pottery has since confirmed dairying at scale. The change is quietly enormous — a living cow yields far more over its life than a dead one, wool makes textiles possible where flax will not grow, and oxen power the plough and the cart.