Humans probably didn’t want to tame sheep and goats

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Each pet presents a mystery of how it appeared. Sometime in the distant past, an animal – be it a wolf, a wild ox, a jungle fowl or a wild boar – began to trot down a road that ended in dependence or even reliance on human beings.

In Aşıklı Höyük, a Stone Age town in the central highlands of Turkey, a team of archaeologists, writing in the review PNAS earlier this week pieced together what that process looked like for sheep and goats, some of the earliest herd animals. The village, one of many experimenting with animal husbandry, contains 1,000 years of bones, feces and settlement in one place, allowing archaeologists to piece together a time frame of domestication.

“The puzzle comes together,” says Mary Stiner, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Arizona and first author of the new study, “and you get the big picture.”

People first settled in the village 10,400 years ago and set up seasonal houses on the banks of a river. People from Turkey to present-day Syria, Iraq and Iran were beginning to experiment with food storage around this time, Stiner says, which occurred right after the glaciers retreated. The people of Aşıklı Höyük played gardening, even growing some forms of wheat, although they still mainly ate fodder plants. Most of their meat came from the sheep and goats of the surrounding hills. These horned animals stood on long legs, unlike their round cousins ​​seen on a farm today.

A modern domestic sheep. Image: lifeonwhite/Repository Photos

The relationship with these animals was born from hunting. At first, the inhabitants of Aşıklı Höyük kept young wild goats and sheep in small enclosures between their houses, where the captured animals left telltale traces of manure. The people of Aşıklı Höyük only bred the animals for a few months – most of the bones from this period are from adolescent animals, killed during the transition to adulthood.

The puzzle is why people would have raised young animals. “We can’t expect people to imagine an outcome” – like a managed herd of animals – “that was beyond any experience people would have had,” Stiner points out.

“It’s not about making them docile pets,” she says. “This is live storage, probably for next winter.” The people of this village may also have been spiritually motivated to herd animals. Somewhere else In the region, the carcasses of pigs, goats and sheep were cut into large pieces to be roasted or smoked – and presumably shared. It is a practice that shares some similarities with ritual sacrifice or other ceremonies. Keeping a few young animals around could have been a way to ensure there would be meat for a feast.

Four hundred years later, around 8000 BCE, the inhabitants of the village lived there full time. They started keeping bigger herds and the manure tracks became big piles. A few of these animals have begun to reproduce, as shown by the growing number of skeletons of aborted sheep and goats in the colony.

[Related: Did humans truly domesticate dogs? Canine history is more of a mystery than you think.]

These unborn skeletons are also evidence of another kind: a steep learning curve for successfully raising cattle. Other research has shown that these early captive animals suffered from joint problems, and the high rate of miscarriages suggests that goats and sheep were not getting the food they needed. “Lockdown has a huge impact on these animals,” Stiner says. “They make a lot of mistakes.”

But over a thousand years, the villagers seem to have figured out the skills they needed to keep the animals alive, and even raise them. Foods from different sources – mountain pastures or village gardens – leave a distinct imprint in the form of isotopes in the bones of cattle, as well as in the humans who eat them. Based on these signatures, as the colony drew to a close, people got almost all their meat from domesticated cattle, except during religious ceremonies, where wild cattle seemed to have taken center stage.

At the same time, the villagers gave the sheep and goats more freedom – they were left in the forests and meadows, where they ate wild plants, rather than being penned near the village. This suggests that the animals began to act tame. After all, to bring an animal to pasture, you have to trust that it will not run away. But even these mild-mannered animals did not resemble the animals we know today: sheep still had long legs like their wild ancestors, and there is no evidence that they were bred for wool.

But at the end of the village’s existence, it seems that men and animals began to depend on each other.

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