[Sidenote: Was the domestication of animals a result of totemism?]
Some anthropologists have argued that the domestication of animals and even agriculture resulted from totemism.[184] Thus Monsieur Reinach insists that the domestication of the boar is an irrefragable proof of its former sanctity; for, he argues, if men had always thought themselves entitled to kill and eat boars, boars would never have multiplied under human protection, and become the ancestors of domestic swine. Domestication, he considers, implies a long truce between men and animals, something analogous to the Golden Age, celebrated by poets of antiquity, in which men were vegetarians. One may be pardoned for maintaining a sceptical attitude towards a theory which is obviously incapable of proof, which to men who live remote from libraries but in the midst of animals presents insuperable difficulties, and which, moreover, seems to imply that prehistoric tribes were excessively stupid. If it were true, one would expect to find that oxen, sheep, and pigs had been reared in the Palaeolithic Age, and that modern totem groups had domesticated or were now domesticating totem animals. But the only animal which the cave-dwellers of South-Western France apparently domesticated was the horse, which was doubtless lassoed and fastened not because it was sacred but for food;[185] and the Aruntas have no domestic animals. A hungry Australian would have no scruple in killing and eating an animal, not belonging to his own totem-species, which by his wife would be deemed sacred: the Bantus have sheep and oxen, but neither the ox nor the sheep is among their totems. What motive could savages have had for keeping totem-animals in captivity in large numbers unless they had desired to eat their flesh or to drink their milk, and why should they have toiled to provide food for them in winter? Why should the domestication of any species be impossible unless the lives of the animals were spared for a long term of years; and why, if every bull and ram were suffered to gratify its sexual instincts unchecked, and cows and ewes were unmilked and unused, should they become tame.[186] It is surely not incredible that primitive hunters, not belonging to Bull or Boar clans, who saw that wild oxen and wild boars were good for food, should have conceived the idea of ensuring a more constant supply by trapping young animals, taming them, and breeding from them. Totemism may conceivably have had some influence upon the domestication of animals; but it seems probable that there was room for common sense.[187] And the mere fact that a piece of sculpture representing an ear of barley was found in a cave at Lourdes hardly seems sufficient to justify the conclusion that barley was an object of worship in the Palaeolithic Age, and that its subsequent cultivation was due to totemism.[188] What we may safely conclude is that exogamy, with which totemism is commonly associated, although they may have been originally distinct, was one of the chief factors in consolidating groups and allying them together.[189]