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Old
Goats in Transition
Along the craggy limestone ridges of the Zagros Mountains that run through western Iran and northeastern Iraq, the relationship between humans and goats dramatically changed around 10,000 years ago. New research by Dr. Melinda Zeder, Curator of Old World Archaeology & Zooarchaeology at the National Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Brian Hesse of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shows that goats, hunted in the region since the time of Neanderthals, were now being bred and herded instead. Their findings on this historic shift, which forever changed both the societies of human herders and the ecology of regions where goats and other livestock animals lived, were reported in the March 24, 2000 issue of Science.
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Archaeologists have long struggled to identify the origins of animal domestication in many cultures worldwide, from the fertile crescent region of the Near East to the tip of South America. They long thought that domesticated animals became smaller in body size than their wild ancestors or contemporaries. Zeder and Hesse's new work challenges the idea that size reduction serves to mark the initial domestication of goats, the earliest domesticated livestock species. Using modern wild and domestic goat skeletons of documented age and sex, Zeder discovered that sex, not domestic status, is the single most important factor affecting body size. This, and the ability to determine age of death from the state of bone fusion of various skeletal elements, made it possible to reconstruct sex-specific slaughter profiles for ancient animals as an alternative, and more powerful, means of marking early animal domestication |
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How? By knowing that a hunter is more likely to target
larger adult individuals (generally males) which return more meat for every
kill while the herder, interested in promoting the productivity of the herd,
is likely to kill males at young ages - and allow females and a few breeding
males to survive much longer. These different slaughter strategies leave
behind distinctive signature profiles in the ages and sexes of the animal
bones accumulated in the trash dumps of the living sites kept by herders and
hunters. The very earliest stages of animal domestication can thus be
seen in the archaeological record before the bones of these first
domesticates reveal any marked changes in the size or form. |
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The enormous ecological and human consequences - the spread of agricultural economies, the loss of biodiversity, and the development of cities - has become a fact of life ever since. By applying the Zeder and Hesse methods to other domesticated animal species in other regions of the world, we may yet learn why humans made a fundamental shift in lifestyle. Humans had been hunter-gatherers for over one million years and shifted to a lifestyle of tilling the soil and herding animals. This lifestyle change is one of the most fundamental changes in human history and marks the threshold of the modern era. |
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