Goats and sheep
The first livestock are small, herdable animals that eat what people cannot.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Goats are domesticated from the bezoar ibex in the Zagros mountains and sheep from the Asiatic mouflon in Anatolia, both around 8500 BCE. They convert grass, scrub and stubble — inedible to humans — into meat, milk, hide and eventually wool, and they are small enough to handle and to move. Herd management is visible archaeologically before morphological change is: the age and sex profiles of slaughtered animals shift long before the bones do.