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The human population exploits and depends on many animal and plant species for food, mainly through agriculture, but also by exploiting wild populations, notably of marine fish. [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ 12 ] Livestock animals are raised for meat across the world; they include (2011) around 1.4 billion cattle , 1.2 billion sheep and 1 billion domestic pigs .
They are distinguished from scientific taxonomies that claim to be disembedded from social relations and thus more objective and universal. Folk taxonomies exist to allow popular identification of classes of objects, and apply to all subsections of human activity. All parts of the world have their own systems of naming local plants and animals.
The classification of living things into animals and plants is an ancient one. Aristotle (384–322 BC) classified animal species in his History of Animals, while his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371 –c. 287 BC) wrote a parallel work, the Historia Plantarum, on plants. [7]
He not only introduced the standard of class, order, genus, and species, but also made it possible to identify plants and animals from his book, by using the smaller parts of the flower (known as the Linnaean system). [51] Plant and animal taxonomists regard Linnaeus' work as the "starting point" for valid names (at 1753 and 1758 respectively ...
Cro-Magnons are well known for having painted or engraved geometric designs, hand stencils, plants, animals, and seemingly human/animal hybrid creatures on cave walls deep inside caves. Typically the same species are represented in caves which have such art, but the total number of species is quite numerous, and namely includes creatures such ...
An animal that exhibits a high degree of sociality is called a social animal. The highest degree of sociality recognized by sociobiologists is eusociality . A eusocial taxon is one that exhibits overlapping adult generations , reproductive division of labor , cooperative care of young, and—in the most refined cases—a biological caste system .
For example, the human species is uniquely identified within the animal kingdom by the name Homo sapiens. No other species of animal can have this same binomen (the technical term for a binomial in the case of animals). Prior to Linnaean taxonomy, animals were classified according to their mode of movement.
Plants are crucial to the future of human society as they provide food, oxygen, biochemicals, and products for people, as well as creating and preserving soil. [60] Historically, all living things were classified as either animals or plants [61] and botany covered the study of all organisms not considered animals. [62]