Using a random number generator to select my books is going well. I wanted to read this, but I suspect it would have languished in the pile.
Here’s the blurb …
‘This book deserves a place in your bookcase next to Harari’s Sapiens. It’s every bit as fascinating and is surely destined to be just as successful’ Julian Norton From the plains of ancient Mesopotamia to the vast sheep farms of modern-day Australia, sheep have been central to the human story. Since our our Neolithic ancestors’ first forays into sheep-rearing nearly 11,000 years ago, these remarkable animals have fed us, clothed us, changed our diet and language and financed the conquest of large swathes of the earth.Sally Coulthard weaves this fascinating story into a vivid and colourful tapestry of engaging anecdotes and extraordinary ovine facts, whose multiple strands celebrate just how pivotal these woolly animals are to almost every aspect of human society and culture.This title was published also in the United States under the title Follow the Flock.‘A snappy, stimulating book, and certainly not just for shepherds’ Mail on Sunday‘Full of fascinating social history’ Independent‘You won’t look at a sheep in the same way again’ Country Living.
I am a knitter and I am fascinated by sheep. I would like to know the source of my yarn (although that seems impossible in Australia), what type of sheep it came from, etc.
This book has 14 chapters with different aspects of sheep history and evolution (breeding), the way humans have used sheep, and the way sheep have been fundamental to human development. Also, what should happen now? In this world of climate change? Wool is a wonder material, which must have a part to play in the future.
I found this a bit icky
The only way to do this [domesticate a sheep] would be to take a lamb from its mother as soon as it was born and breastfeed it. And so, astonishingly, the history of sheep may indeed have started with a woman nursing a newborn lamb.
And I guess this is the lot of archaeologists
At the end of the 1990s, archaeologists had the rather unusual privilege of being allowed to sift through the remains of a seventeenth-century toilet at Dudley Castle in the West Midlands.
They found sheep’s gut condoms.
A review.