From Reay Tannahill’s Food in History:
It is impossible to know when human beings first began to dig for their food as well as gathering surface plants, but in Europe the wild ancestors of turnips, onions and radishes were used in prehistoric times, and what we now think of as flower bulbs may also have played a part in the diet. (p. 11)
There is little doubt that, from the millennia of gathering vegetables and fruits, women had discovered that it was sometimes possible to exert an active influence on plant growth. Given the right time of year and a modicum of good luck, an undersized turnip or radish put back into the ground would continue to swell; a single clove of garlic or a shallot would multiply into a cluster. (p. 17)
[From 9000 to 7000 BC, by] almost imperceptible stages, gathering developed into cultivating. The villagers discovered after a while that if they were too efficient at harvesting the wild grain, the following year’s crop would be drastically reduced. Then they learned to leave some of the ears on the stalks, with better but patchy results. When they took the next logical step and vegan to scatter some of the their carefully collected seeds evenly, by hand, over the soil, they ceased to be gatherers and became farmers. (p. 21)
Even before the glaciers retreated from Europe, [man] had begun to come to terms with the reindeer. Feeding on the mosses and ferns that flourished on land watered by melting ice, the reindeer suffered from salt deficiency and instinctively compensated for it by making periodic excursions either to the seashore or to inland salt licks; even a sprinkling of human urine helped to satisfy its need. Men, using this readily available substance as bait, began to entice the reindeer to the vicinity of their caves and even began building up the interdependence that was to play such a vital role in the subsequent domestication of animals. (p. 17)
What I’m thinking of there, of course, is about Siberian shamans supposedly observing reindeer eating amanita muscaria mushrooms and getting high from it; and experiencing the same effect just by licking up or drinking their (reindeers’, and shamans’) own urine, which contains enough of the unmetabolized hallucinogens to still trip off of it. (Plus, amanita tea—made just by steeping the mushroom caps in water—has a medium-yellow color strikingly similar to that of urine.)
[B]y late Neolithic times it was usually the creation myth (a magical explanation of the making of earth and heaven, people, beasts and birds) that preoccupied the hunting peoples and herdsmen, and the resurrection myth (explaining the annual death and rebirth of the soil) that obsessed agriculturalists as they waited for the barren ground to spring to life again. The fertility myth, subsidiary to both, could be accommodated in either.
The resurrection myth appeared in its basic form in the mythology of the predominantly agricultural Sumerians (c. 3500 BC). Inanna, goddess of love and war, set off to conquer the nether regions; while she was away the land remained infertile, but when, after many adventures, she returned to earth, everything came to life again.
[footnote: With regional variations, the same tale of human dependence on a semi-mortal god appears throughout most of the early world. In Egypt the god Osiris died and was resurrected; in Canaan Baal was below ground for seven full years during which drought and pestilence reigned on earth; in Greece Persephone spent six months out of every twelve in the underworld. Even in the Jesus of the New Testament, dead and then resurrected, echoed the early farmer's need to know that seeming death was not the end, either for nature of mankind.]
During the last 3000 years BC, however, the whole area from Sumer (under its more familiar name of Babylon) to north-west India was subject to a series of invasions by the nomad pastoralists of Central Asia. The gods of the nomads were very different from those of the settled agricultural people—positive and dynamic, gods who did things, creators gods, not saviors. As the invaders settled down and achieved a modus vivendi with their new subjects, so too did their gods, making a place for themselves in the agriculturalists’ pantheon and forcing a merger between the resurrection and creation myths.
Even so, the pastoralists’ Bull of heaven … was to sustain an independent role in many mythologies for thousands of years. Sometimes the role was half-playful, a cover for the amorous energies of Zeus. Sometimes it was symbolic, as in the Zoroastrian creed of Persia, where the original war between good and evil, light and darkness, was fought between cattle and wolves. (p. 33-5)
It is often said that the common Near Eastern prohibition on pork—in the Jewish and Muslim religions, for example—had its origins in medical doctrine, and certainly, pork can be a dangerous meat in a hot climate, which may well have been taken into account when dietary regulations were being formatuled.
But although the peoples of the Near East … must have known this for something like 5000 years, pork did not become taboo until after 1800 BC. The precise date is still debatable, but there is a clear correlation between the emergence of the taboo on pork and the arrival of the tribes of nomadic invaders who swept or drifted across great areas of eastern Europe and western Asia in the second millennium BC. These tribes, accustomed to sheep and cattle, seem to have had an almost pathological hatred for the pig—a wayward beast with little stamina, a constitutional objection to being herded and a tiresome inability to live on grass.
The Indo-European nomads disseminated much that was new throughout the lands they invaded and sometimes (if briefly) ruled, and one of their legacies was an institutionalized rejection of pork. (p. 54)
Mosaic law [was] designed to reunite [the Hebrews] by spelling out how they differed form the other peoples of their world and strengthening the single great bond that bound them—their worship of, and dependence on, Yahweh. (p. 55)
Biblio: Tannahill, Reay (1989 [1973]), Food in History (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.).