Category: Livestock

An article in the NY Times summarizes some interesting recent thinking about the beginning of animal domestication in the Mediterranean. It is based on an article in PNAS by Melinda Zader at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I leaned about it via Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, where you’ll find some additional links and some interesting comments.

The conventional way to time animal domestication has been to look for smaller boned animals in the archaelological record. But it seems that if you instead look for the first signs of human management of herds, rather than the morphological signal, you can push the date of domestication back a thousand years, to 11,000 years ago. There were multiple domestications of each livestock species, and different species originated in different areas within the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. Then it seems people moved these livestock, and the associated crops, by sea across and along the Mediterranean. These seafaring colonists established coastal Neolithic enclaves, from which agriculture spread inland. There was also “adoption of domesticates and domestic technologies by indigenous populations and the local domestication of some endemic species.”

It looks like we may be going back to a model of agricultural expansion based on the movement of people, rather than on the diffusion of technologies.