SUBSISTENCE

The First Herds

~10,400 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian

In the hills from Anatolia to the Zagros, people began keeping goats and sheep alive rather than only hunting them, around 10,400 years ago. Ancient goat genomes from Iran show managed, genetically distinct herds by 10,200 years ago; at Asikli Höyük in Turkey the process started as catch-and-grow, wild lambs raised a few months in the village, and was reinvented locally, supporting several independent centres.

Why it matters

A herd is a larder that walks and breeds. Keeping animals turned meat, milk, hides and dung into a steady income rather than a windfall, and it began the long entanglement, biological and epidemiological, between people and livestock. The herders' choices, which males to cull, which females to keep, were the first sustained breeding programme, evolution redirected by hand.

Dating & uncertainty

Managed goats are visible genetically in the Zagros by about 8200 BCE, some 10,200 years ago, and a local sheep-and-goat pathway begins at Asikli Höyük around 8400 BCE. Domestication was a process, not a date: centuries of penning and culling preceded any visible change in the animals' bones.

Sources

1. Stiner et al. (2022), PNAS · An endemic pathway to sheep and goat domestication at Asikli Höyük (Central Anatolia, Turkey)doi:10.1073/pnas.2110930119
2. Daly et al. (2021), PNAS · Herded and hunted goat genomes from the dawn of domestication in the Zagros Mountainsdoi:10.1073/pnas.2100901118
3. Arbuckle & Hammer (2019), Journal of Archaeological Research · The rise of pastoralism in the ancient Near Eastdoi:10.1007/s10814-018-9124-8

Our species’ history as one day

23:12:2747 min 33 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day