The Agricultural Revolution Began With the Domestication of Goats and Sheep
Around the end of the last age, Middle Eastern hunters in the mountains of today’s Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, started to benefit from keeping some game animals close at hand – a protracted process that began by learning to manage flocks of wild sheep. By then, humans had tamed some particularly friendly wolves, and over succeeding generation had learned to train and breed them, resulting in the transformation of some wolves into man’s best friend, the dog.
The knowledge gained from domesticating dogs was tried on other animals, usually without success as most animals can at best be tamed as individuals, but not domesticated as a species. However, some animals have behavioral characteristics and social structures that lend themselves to domestication. By carefully exploiting those traits, some hunter gatherer communities managed to successfully domesticate goats and sheep, transforming what had once been herds of wild game into docile flocks.
The domestication of sheep consisted of a rough and ready systemic breeding of wild flocks by killing off the nastiest rams in nearby herds, while being kind to the rest. It was far from a straightforward process, and must have had many ups downs, and continuous difficulties – particularly with the rams during mating season. However, it eventually led to wild flocks whose ewes became so gentle and docile that hunters could approach and milk them. Over the generations of selective breeding, the wild mountain sheep grew increasingly more gentle, docile, plump and sheepish, and the peoples managing those herds were transformed from hunters into shepherds.
That sheep domestication template was used with other domesticable animals. Around the same time as sheep were being domesticated, a strain of Iranian ibex was transformed into today’s goats. Around 9000 BC, wild boars in northern China and today’s Turkey were domesticated into pigs. By 8000 BC, wild aurochs had been domesticated into cattle in the Middle East and India. Similar processes were used around the world to domesticate water buffalo, yaks, horses, donkeys, camels, reindeer, llama, alpaca, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, pigeons, and other staples of animal husbandry.