Domestication of Sheep and Goats in the Neolithic Near East

The domestication of sheep and goats, which began in the mountains of the Near East around 8500–8000 BC, turned two wild hill animals into the first herded livestock in human history. In the uplands of what are now Iran, Iraq and Turkey, people who had hunted wild goats and sheep for generations began to control their breeding, movement and slaughter. The result was a portable, renewable source of meat, milk, hides and eventually wool that helped farming spread across three continents.

The wild ancestors

Domestic goats (Capra hircus) descend from the bezoar goat, Capra aegagrus, a sure-footed animal of rocky slopes that still survives in Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus and parts of Central Asia. Bezoar males carry long, curved, scimitar-shaped horns, and both sexes live in herds that move between summer and winter pastures.

Domestic sheep (Ovis aries) descend from the Asiatic mouflon, a wild sheep of eastern Anatolia, northern Iraq and western Iran (often classified as Ovis orientalis or Ovis gmelini). Unlike modern breeds, mouflon have a short coat of coarse hair with only a fine woolly undercoat.

Both species had been hunted for tens of thousands of years. They were good candidates for domestication because they live in social groups with a clear hierarchy, tolerate crowding, breed readily in captivity and eat a wide range of plants.

The timing was also shaped by climate. After the end of the last Ice Age, around 9700 BC, the Near East became warmer and wetter, and settled villages multiplied. As local populations grew and hunting pressure on wild herds increased, managing animals rather than simply chasing them became an attractive way to secure a steady supply of meat close to home.

Where and when it happened

Domestication did not happen in a single place or moment. Archaeological and genetic evidence points to a broad zone along the arc of mountains that frames the Fertile Crescent: the Taurus Mountains of south-eastern Turkey and the Zagros Mountains on the border of Iraq and Iran.

In south-eastern Anatolia, sites such as Nevalı Çori and Çayönü show signs of sheep and goat management in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period (roughly 8500–7000 BC). At Aşıklı Höyük in central Anatolia, researchers have found evidence that sheep and goats were kept close to houses, including thick layers of dung and salts from animal urine, from about the mid 9th millennium BC.

In the Zagros, the key site is Ganj Dareh in Kermanshah Province, western Iran. This small village was occupied for a few centuries around 8000 BC (most estimates fall between about 8200 and 7600 BC) and has produced one of the clearest case studies of early goat herding.

The evidence from Ganj Dareh

In 2000 the archaeozoologists Melinda Zeder and Brian Hesse published a study of goat bones from Ganj Dareh. They found that most young males had been slaughtered at around two years of age, while females were allowed to live much longer. This is the pattern herders follow today: a few males are enough to breed, so surplus young males are eaten, and females are kept for their offspring and milk.

Hunters of wild goats tend to target large adult males, which yield the most meat. The Ganj Dareh pattern therefore suggests that people were managing herds rather than simply hunting. Crucially, the goats at Ganj Dareh were still the same size and shape as wild bezoar goats.

This finding changed how scientists think about domestication. It showed that human control over animal populations could begin well before any visible change in the animals’ bodies. Smaller size and altered horn shapes appeared later, after generations of breeding under human control.

How domestication worked

Researchers usually describe animal domestication as a long process with several stages rather than a sudden invention. A common model for sheep and goats runs roughly as follows:

1. Hunters began to manage wild herds, for example by sparing young females, to keep game numbers stable.
2. Some animals were captured, penned near settlements and fed, often on crop waste or fodder.
3. Over generations, people chose which animals bred, favouring calm and manageable individuals.
4. Herds became genetically isolated from wild populations, and physical changes followed.

Ancient DNA has made the picture more complex. A 2018 study of ancient goat genomes led by Kevin Daly and Daniel Bradley found that early domestic goats in the Zagros, Anatolia and the southern Levant drew on several different wild populations. This suggests that domestication was a dispersed process across a wide region, with herds exchanged and mixed over time.

Uses: meat, milk, hides and wool

The first herders kept sheep and goats mainly for meat. Living animals also served as a “walking larder” that could be eaten when crops failed, and their hides, horns, bones and sinews supplied raw materials.

Milk came into use early. Chemical traces of milk fats preserved in pottery from north-western Anatolia show that people were processing milk by about 6500 BC. Because most adults at the time could not digest lactose well, milk was probably turned into yogurt, cheese or butter, which contain less lactose.

Wool came much later. Woolly sheep with thick, soft fleeces were bred over thousands of years, and wool production became economically important around the 4th millennium BC in Mesopotamia. The textile industries of later civilisations grew from this development.

Spread beyond the homeland

Domestic sheep and goats travelled with farmers. By about 8500–8000 BC, people had carried them by boat to Cyprus, an island with no native wild sheep or goats. The mouflon still found today on Cyprus, Corsica and Sardinia are descendants of early domestic sheep that returned to the wild.

From Anatolia, herders brought sheep and goats into Greece and the Balkans before 6500 BC, as part of the spread of farming into Europe. Other herds moved east to Iran, Central Asia and South Asia, where sites such as Mehrgarh in Pakistan show goat herding by about 7000 BC. Sheep and goats reached North Africa and later sub-Saharan Africa over the following millennia.

Timeline

• c. 9000–8500 BC: Hunters in the Taurus and Zagros foothills increasingly target wild sheep and goats; first signs of herd management.
• c. 8500–8000 BC: Managed sheep and goats appear at sites in south-eastern and central Anatolia, including Aşıklı Höyük.
• c. 8500–8000 BC: Domestic sheep and goats are carried by boat to Cyprus.
• c. 8000 BC: Goats at Ganj Dareh in the Zagros show a herder’s culling pattern while still looking wild.
• c. 7500–7000 BC: Smaller body size and changed horn shapes become common in domestic herds.
• c. 7000 BC: Goat herding is established at Mehrgarh in South Asia.
• c. 6500 BC: Sheep and goats reach Greece with the first European farmers; milk is processed in Anatolia.
• 4th millennium BC: Woolly sheep become important in Mesopotamia.

Why it matters

Sheep and goats were among the first livestock animals, alongside the slightly later taming of cattle. Together with wheat and barley, they formed the core of the Neolithic farming package that spread from the Near East into Europe, Africa and Asia.

Their domestication also showed humans a new relationship with animals, based on control of breeding rather than the hunt. Today there are more than a billion sheep and more than a billion goats worldwide, and many rural communities still depend on them much as the first herders of the Zagros did.