Unnatural Evolution

After 3.5 billion years of doing something, you would think you’d know what you were about. Why then, would Mother Nature design something that needed human assistance? Particularly given the item humans needed to help in their role, wasn’t invented until the 19th century.

Just what was Mother thinking when she invented sheep?

As you might expect, She had it sorted, until the human race interfered.

Up until around 7,000BC, the wild Asian ‘mouflon’ was content with its nomadic existence. Its long-haired outer coat kept it warm in the harsh weather, and was shed each spring, and a softer inner coat kept them warm. Then along came New Stone Age Man who started the process of domestication, although they likely kept them for their meat, not wool. It was many centuries later, around 400AD that records started, referring to ‘sheep plucking’ wool to make clothing – shears were still many hundreds of years off.

With human migration heading north, it was around 3,000BC that sheep reached Britain, as neolithic settlers crossed what is now, the English Channel.

Inevitably it was the Romans who accelerated the breeding programme, primarily to improve the quality of the wool for their clothing – the men wore a fine woollen toga over their tunic, and married women, a woollen mantle known as a palla. They also bred sheep for the colours they wanted – white, black, and red. The wool industry was gathering momentum, and sheep were now bred for their wool more than their meat.

By the Middle Ages, Spaniards were crossbreeding Spanish ewes with African rams from Morrocco, to create Merino sheep; the wool was finer and softer than any other, and Spain cornered the European wool market. It was such a valuable industry, that up until 1700 you could be put to death for selling sheep outside of the country. But Spanish monarchs eventually capitulated, possibly due to the invasion by France, and other wars that were happening across the continent, and began to share their woolly assets with the rest of Europe, but not England.

It was King George III, who ruled from 1760-1820, and was a keen agriculturist, who enlisted the help of Sir Joseph Banks to smuggle a flock of merino sheep out of Spain, so they could be bred with British sheep. Shortly afterwards, there was a big influx, probably due to the French civil war.

Meanwhile, over in the newly formed United States of America, the sheep that survived the revolution were small and scruffy. It was George Washington’s nephew, G W Parke Curtis who took over his uncle’s farm, and bred a Persian ram with local stock to develop the Arlington Longwool sheep.

But as the world economy changed, and wool was usurped by cheaper manmade fibres, many sheep farms closed resulting in some flocks being abandoned, leaving them to become semi-wild again. In 1973, The Rare Breeds Survival Trust was set up in the UK, to conserve and promote native breeds. From the Greyface Dartmoor to the Teeswater, and the Lonk to the Welsh Mountain Pedigree, they are all now considered ‘native’ breeds.

Which immediately raised another question. How long does a species have to live somewhere before it becomes ‘native’?

In practice, defining if something is native or non-native is not so easy to do. The Royal Society of Biology states the theory is straightforward enough, with one suggestion using the year 1500AD as the cut-off date, and species present in an area before this time regarded as native, and those that arrived after, non-native.

So, in answer to my question, Mother Nature had done her part very successfully, unsurprisingly, it was the human race who changed the equilibrium to achieve their aims. As that greatest of all men who understands nature, Sir David Attenborough once said:

‘Nature once determined how we survive. Now we determine how Nature survives.’

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