Animal Domestication

Christine M. Rodrigue
Department of Geography
California State University
Long Beach, CA 90840-1101 USA
rodrigue@csulb.edu

This article was originally published as:

Permission to place this copy on my web site was kindly granted by Ms. Michele Thompson, Executive Assistant to the Publisher, SAGE Reference, on 11 February 2011, for which I would like to express my sincerest thanks. Other authors are encouraged to seek permission to place their entries online by contacting referencepublisher@sagepub.com.

      For most of human existence, people lived as seasonally mobile gatherers, hunters, and fishers. A profound change in the human relationship with nature occurred when people established control over the reproduction and evolution of owned populations of other species, which became domesticated plants and animals. Because of its epochal transformation of the nature-society relationship, the early integration of agriculture and animal husbandry has been called the "Neolithic Revolution."

      The domestication of animals is a major part of this transformation, and geographers have investigated it from their discipline's earliest formalization in the 19th century. Early geographers writing about the domestication of animals include Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Ratzel, and Eduard Hahn, and, in the 20th century, Carl Sauer, Erich Isaac, Frederick and Elizabeth Simoons, and Carl Johannessen.

      Archæologists, ecologists, and zoölogists share this interest, but geographers' approach differs from others' in three distinctive ways. First, the geographic tradition in animal domestication studies uniquely stresses the rôle of ritual and religion in motivating people to take on the work and risk of animal husbandry.

      Second, many geographers assert a three-stages scheme of cultural ecological change, from migratory gathering-hunting-fishing societies, through settling down in villages securely supported by fishing and successful experiments with plant propagation, to the domestication of animals, all in stable environments not strongly affected by post-glacial changes. They argued that economic necessity could not have motivated such well-fed folk to domesticate animals, so these sometimes dangerous endeavors were driven by the desire to get along with the supernatural.

      A third focus of many geographers' work is diffusion(ism). This attempts to pin down the original "hearth" of domestication and then trace out the paths along which the animals themselves or the idea of their active management might have diffused.

      Animals' evolution under human control eventually led to significant genetic and phenotypic divergences from wild populations. Some phenotypic changes allow advanced animal domestication to be recognized in faunal remains. Earlier stages can be detected in changing age-sex structures. The archæological and palæoenvironmental record both contradicts and sometimes supports the distinctive geographic argument.

      Almost certainly the longest domesticated animal is the dog, actually a wolf, Canis lupus (C. lupus familiaris). The oldest archæological remains of domesticated dogs go back about 14,000 calibrated BP (years before the "present" of 1950) in Germany and 12,000 cal. BP in Israel, while analysis of mitochondrial DNA in modern dogs suggests descent from three females in East Asia some 15,000 years ago (roughly the end of the last Pleistocene glaciation). In the Levant, changes in the age-sex structure of gazelles (Gazella gazella) imply the Late Natufian culture of 11,500 to 12,800 cal. BP initiated their domestication during the cooling and drying of the Younger Dryas.

      A second wave of animal domestications followed quickly after the dog's (and gazelle's?), in the 11,000 to 10,000 cal. BP time frame in the early Holocene Hypsithermal warming. These have long been understood to include sheep, Ovis orientalis aries (northern Iraq), and goats, Capra ægagrus hircus (western Iran), but recent analyses have pushed pig (Sus scrofa domesticus) domestication back to the same time in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. Long considered a much later domesticate, recent DNA analyses suggest that cattle, Bos primigenius taurus, were domesticated in that same 11,000 to 10,000 BP window in northeast Africa. Chickens, Gallus gallus domesticus, may also go back to this time frame or slightly after, according to mtDNA analyses, with origins in Southeastern and South Asia. Archæological finds on Cyprus put cats (Felis sylvestris catus) back to 9,500 cal. BP.

      This second wave shows animal domestication underway in several specific locations in two broad regions, the Southwest Asia/Northeast African region and the Southeastern/South Asian region, loosely supporting the notion of a hearth. For decades, however, geographers and archæologists dismissed significant Pleistocene-Holocene environmental change in the Near East as relevant to early domestications. Physical geographers increasingly document the magnitude and, often, abruptness of environmental changes at that transition, both in the Near East and Southeast/South Asia, as well as globally. They are an important context to domestication processes in the 14,500 to 10,000 cal. BP time frame.

      Within these two broad regions, particular animal domestications evolved in specific locations that both overlapped and differed from those in which plant domestications were going on at the same time (not long before, as geographers' three-stages models had assumed). Rapid criss-cross diffusion from one place to another within these regions integrated animal and plant domestications into agricultural and/or horticultural complexes. These then exploded outward with rapidly expanding human populations and with the ensuing exchange of resources and ideas.

      A third wave of animal domestications followed much later, from 7,000 to 4,500 cal. BP. This involved the New World and extensive portions of the Old World. Species domesticated then included the alpaca (Vicugna pacos), llama (Lama glama), and guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) in Peru; the pigeon (Columba livia domestica) in Mesopotamia and Assyria; the horse (Equus ferus caballus) in the Ukraine, southern Russia, and western Kazakhstan; the ass (E. africanus asinus) in northeast Africa and possibly in Somalia; the Bactrian (Camelus ferus bactrianus) camel in northwest China, Turkmenia, and eastern Iran; the dromedary (Camelus dromedarius) in the Arabian Peninsula; several bovines in India, southern Iraq, Southeast Asia, and Tibet; and the silkworm (Bombyx mandarina mori) in China.

      Newer domestications have continued all over the world to the present. Some of these are utilitarian, for meat, fur, honey, working, or laboratory use (turkeys and rabbits; mink; bees; cormorants; and rats); some are experimental with an eye toward utilitarian value (eland, fallow deer, ostrich, and foxes); while others are for pet-keeping (parakeets, koi, "fancy rats").

Cross References

  • Animal geographies; climate change; nomadic herding; Sauer, Carl

Further Reading

  • Zeder, M.A., Bradley, D.G., Emshwiller, E., & Smith, B.D. (Eds.). (2006). Documenting Domestication: New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms. Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press.

first placed on the web: 02/11/11
last revised: 02/11/11
maintained by C.M. Rodrigue