I once went to Kenya in the middle of the great wildebeest migration – the annual marathon where millions of these cow-like antelopes travel long distances in search of greener pastures. At one point, we stopped our jeep for over half an hour to let an impossibly long line of them cross in front of us. Without microbes to extract as much nourishment as possible from tough indigestible mouthfuls, these herbivores wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t, either. It’s hard to imagine that without domesticated ruminants, humanity would ever have gone far beyond hunting, gathering, and basic farming, much less
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