Sheep for Kids - when did people first keep sheep? Did people use
sheep for wool or for meat? Who could be a shepherd?
Sheep
Sheep are an important part of the economy of the Mediterranean,
Europe, and Western Asia even today. They were much more important long
ago. People wore
clothes made out of
wool from the sheep, and they drank milk
from the sheep and ate its cheese and its meat (the meat of baby sheep is
called lamb; meat from grown-up sheep is called mutton). Tapestries for
the walls, and carpets for the floors, and blankets, were also all made
out of sheeps' wool.
Here's a video of some sheep baaing:
Sheep generally wandered around from one place to another, through the
villages and around them, looking for grass to eat under the care of a
shepherd. Often shepherds were children, sometimes groups of children.
Joseph, for instance, was out
tending the sheep with his brothers when his brothers sold him to the
Egyptian slave
traders.
People hunted wild sheep from the beginning of the
Stone
Age, with stone-tipped wooden spears and wooden clubs. But around the
end of the Stone Age, about 10,000
BC, some people
in Western Asia began to keep tame, domesticated sheep for themselves. Probably
people began to herd sheep because there were
so
many people living in the area that wild sheep were getting hard to
find. It's more work, and not as much fun, to herd sheep as to hunt them,
but it is a more efficient use of land. If you started by catching a few
lambs in nets, and raising them to know you, it would be easy to domesticate
sheep.
At first people only kept sheep for their meat and their
milk. These early sheep only had hair, like goats. They didn' t have any
wool to make into clothes. But as people began to breed sheep to make them
more useful, they began to breed them with longer hair, and gradually sheep
got woolier. By around 3000 BC, it was possible to spin sheeps' wool and
make it into cloth. Even then, sheep had much less wool than they do today,
after 5000 more years of breeding.
People also bred sheep to be much stupider than wild sheep, so they would
be easier to watch over, and not try to get away. And they bred them to
want to all stay together in one herd, which also made the sheep easier
to watch over.
