The European Mouflon or Mufflon, Ovis orientalis.
Credit:
Jörg Hempel,
CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons
Why would this be? Did this allegedly all-knowing creator not know what mankind would use these animals for or was it just not very good at designing things for a specific purpose?
Many domesticated animals and plants have been so highly modified that their wild ancestors, where these still exist, are barely recognisable as the ancestors of their domestic descendants. Take as an example, the different breeds of domestic sheep, farmed for their wool as well as for their meat. They are believed to be descended from the mufflon, also spelled 'Mouflon', (Ovis orientalis). Once indigenous to Eastern Europe and Western Asia it is now only common in the Caucasus, Anatolia, northern Iraq and north-western Iran. It is also found on the Mediterranean islands of Elba, Sardinia, Corsica and Cyprus but these may be the descendants of feral forms of early domestic sheep, introduced in the Bronze Age.
A characteristic of these wild sheep is that they shed their hair annually and the hair is too short for use as wool for spinning and weaving. It is believed then that they were originally domesticated for meat and only later, due to a mutation which means they keep their wool and need to be sheared annually, and that their wool is now suitable for spinning. I came across this in a book by David W. Anthony (The Horse, the Wheel, and Language) about the origins of the Indo-European languages and the domestication of the horse:
Sheep (Ovis orientalis) were domesticated in the period from about 8000 to 7500 BCE in eastern Anatolia and western Iran as a captive source of meat, which is all they were used for during the first four thousand years of sheepherding. They were covered not with wool but with long, coarse hair called kemp. Wool grew on these sheep as an insulating undercoat of very short curly fibers that, in the words of textile specialist Elizabeth Barber, were “structurally unspinnable.” This “wild” short wool was molted at the end of the winter. In fact, the annual shedding of short wild wool might have created the first crude (and smelly) felts, when sheep slept on their own damp sheddings. The next step would have been to intentionally pluck the wool when it loosened, just before it was shed. But woven wool textiles required wool thread. Wool thread could only be made from unnaturally long wool fibers, as the fibers had to be long enough to cling to each other when pulled apart. A spinner of wool would pull a clump of fibers from a mass of long-fiber wool and twist them into a thread by handfeeding the strand onto a twirling weighted stick, or hand spindle (the spinning wheel was a much later invention). The spindle was suspended in the air and kept twirling with a motion of the wrist. The spindle weights are called spindle whorls, and they are just about the only evidence that survives of ancient thread making, although it is difficult to distinguish spindle whorls used for making woolen thread from those used for making flaxen thread, apparently the oldest kind of thread made by humans. Linen made from flax was the oldest woven textile. Woolen thread was invented only after spinners of flax and other plant fibers began to obtain the longer animal fibers that grew on mutant wool sheep. When did this genetic alteration happen? The conventional wisdom is that wool sheep appeared about 4000– 3500 BCE2.It should not have been beyond the capabilities of a creator god such as the one described in the Bible to know that humans would find wool useful for making clothes, blankets, etc, and that sheep were capable, with the right set of genes, of growing just the right wool needed, yet it either chose to make a less than perfect sheep or it never thought it through and so came up with a poor design that humans have had to improve on.
Footnote:2. The mitochondrial DNA in modern domesticated sheep indicates that all are descended from two ancient episodes of domestication. One cluster (B), including all European and Near Eastern sheep, is descended from the wild Ovis orientalis of eastern Anatolia or western Iran. The other cluster (A) is descended from another Ovis orientalis population, probably in north-central Iran. Other wild Old World ovicaprids, Ovis ammon and Ovis vignei, did not contribute to the genes of domesticated sheep. See Hiendleder et al. 2002. For a general discussion of sheep domestication, see Davis 1987; and Harris 1996.
Anthony, D. W. (2010). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language [Kindle Android version]. Ch. 4. Pp. 68-69. Retrieved from Amazon.com
And there is another aspect to this that Creationists will find disturbing: this particular mutation illustrates the principle of evolutionary biology that the meaning of genetic information is determined by the environment and that mutations are deleterious, advantageous or neither, depending on how the change is interpreted by the environment. Before humans domesticated these wild sheep, having long hair which was not shed annually, would have been detrimental in the heat of the summer. In the context of domestication where humans could either shear or pluck the wool however, it became highly advantageous such that now domestic sheep are one of the most abundant mammals on the planet. In terms of survival, the mutation(s) that allowed the sheep to grow and retain long, curly hair suitable for spinning into yarn, was massively successful and represents a vast improvement on the wild type.
Had that wild type really been created by a magic man in the sky for the sole benefit of mankind, then it was a very poor effort indeed. But of course, the stories in the Bible were written by people who were ignorant of much of history and who knew nothing of the human story that archaeologist and palaeontologists are still finding out for us. To those camp-fire storytellers, it must have seemed as though the late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age farmers had always had their domestic animals and crops pretty much as they were then. They may have been familiar with the wild Mouflons in Northern Iraq, or Mesopotamia as it was called then, but they would have had no idea that their sheep were descendants of these wild animals, they had changed so much from them over the intervening few thousand years.
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