EAAP 2025 Plenary Session: Tracing the Role of Livestock in the Making of Human Civilisation
At the heart of the EAAP Annual Meeting to be held in Innsbruck (Austria) next August, the plenary session entitled “Why Animal Farming Has Been Essential to Human Civilisation”, chaired by President Joel Berard, invites the audience on a exciting journey through human history, uncovering the deep and enduring bond that connects us to animals. This is an ancient, complex relationship—one that has shaped not only our diets but also the very fabric of societies, economies, cultures, and even our genetic identities.
Opening the narrative is Israeli researcher Miki Ben-Dor, with his presentation “From Big Game to Animal Agriculture: How Humans Evolved to Need Animal Food”. Bridging paleoanthropology and evolutionary nutrition, Ben-Dor presents a fascinating thesis: humans did not merely consume animal products—they evolved to depend on them. From hunting prehistoric megafauna to the rise of organised animal husbandry, our relationship with animals as a primary source of nourishment served as a powerful evolutionary driver, leaving lasting imprints on both our physiology and cultures.
He is followed by Greger Larson from the United Kingdom, with “The Story of the Story of Domestication”. A geneticist and historian of domestication, Larson challenges the audience not only to reconsider how animals were domesticated but also how we say that story. His metanarrative dismantles long-held certainties and reconfigures timelines, revealing a process marked by unexpected discoveries, migrations, hybridisations, and deep interconnections between humans and animals. His talk is a call to re-read the past with fresh eyes—more attuned to complexity, less constrained by linear models.
Bringing a social archaeology perspective, Haskel Greenfield, from Canada, presents “How Animals Paved the Way for Modern Civilization”. With scholarly rigour and passion, Greenfield demonstrates how domestication and animal farming enabled the emergence of sedentary life, the formation of villages, the division of labour, and the accumulation of resources. Animals, he argues, were not merely sources of food or labour—they were pivotal agents of social transformation, silent protagonists in humanity’s transition from the Stone Age to civilisation.
The final speaker, Laurent Frantz, from Germany, guides the audience through the genomic history of domestic animals in “A Genomic History of Our Pets and Livestock: From Ancient Origins to Modern Breeding”. Exploiting the power of genomic technologies, Frantz reconstructs the evolutionary and selective trajectories of animals that have shared our spaces, destinies, and genetic heritage for millennia. His account illustrates how our decisions—both conscious and unconscious—have shaped the characteristics of domesticated species, giving rise to a profound entanglement between our cultural DNA and the biological DNA of the animals that have accompanied us throughout history.
The session will culminate in a rich and thought-provoking discussion, an open space where these diverse perspectives can meet and interact. It will be a moment to reflect not only on what animals have meant for our past but also on what they may represent for our future. In a world increasingly focused on sustainability, ethics, and innovation, understanding the past of animal farming is more essential than ever in shaping its path forward.
This session is more than a history lesson or a reflection on animal science—it is an invitation to awareness, to responsibility, and to vision.