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 herds already managed, and genetically distinct from wild goats, by 10,200 years ago. At Asikli Höyük in central Turkey the practice began as catch-and-grow, wild lambs and kids raised a few months in the settlement before slaughter, and it was invented there locally: one of several independent beginnings.
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 a breeding programme in all but name: evolution redirected by hand.
Dating & uncertainty
Managed goats become visible genetically in the Zagros by about 8200 BCE, some 10,200 years ago, and a separate local route to herding opens at Asikli Höyük around 8400 BCE. The animals took a long time to change: roughly a thousand years of penning and selective culling passed before their bones showed it.
Sources
- Stiner et al. (2022), PNAS · An endemic pathway to sheep and goat domestication at Asikli Höyük (Central Anatolia, Turkey)doi:10.1073/pnas.2110930119
- Daly et al. (2021), PNAS · Herded and hunted goat genomes from the dawn of domestication in the Zagros Mountainsdoi:10.1073/pnas.2100901118
- 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
See it on the timeline