Human uses of living things

Human uses of living things, including animals, plants, fungi, and microbes, take many forms, both practical, such as the production of food and clothing, and symbolic, as in art, mythology, and religion. Social sciences including archaeology, anthropology and ethnography are starting to take a multispecies view of human interactions with nature, in which living things are not just resources to be exploited, practically or symbolically, but are involved as participants.

Plants provide the greater part of the food for people and their domestic animals: much of civilisation came into being through agriculture. While many plants have been used for food, a small number of staple crops including wheat, rice, and maize provide most of the food in the world today. In turn, animals provide much of the meat eaten by the human population, whether farmed or hunted, and until the arrival of mechanised transport, terrestrial mammals provided a large part of the power used for work and transport. A variety of living things serve as models in biological research, such as in genetics, and in drug testing. Until the 19th century, plants yielded most of the medicinal drugs in common use, as described in the 1st century by Dioscorides. Plants are the source of many psychoactive drugs, some such as coca known to have been used for thousands of years. Yeast, a fungus, has been used to ferment cereals such as wheat and barley to make bread and beer; other fungi such as Psilocybe and fly agaric mushrooms have been gathered as psychoactive drugs.

Many species of animal are kept as pets, the most popular being mammals, especially dogs and cats. Plants are grown for pleasure in gardens and greenhouses, yielding flowers, shade, and decorative foliage; some, such as cactuses, able to tolerate dry conditions, are grown as houseplants.

Animals such as horses and deer are among the earliest subjects of art, being found in the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings such as at Lascaux. Living things play a wide variety of symbolic roles in literature, film, mythology, and religion. Sometimes a major disease like tuberculosis is depicted in art and literature, in its case being associated for some reason with artistic creativity.