How it began
Goats were among the first domestic animals. Archaeological evidence from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran shows that they were being managed by the late ninth or early eighth millennium BCE, about 8200 BCE. The key sites are Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein, small Neolithic settlements in the central Zagros. The animals descended from the wild bezoar goat. Ganj Dareh is described in the scientific literature as providing the earliest evidence of herd management of goats.
Before it existed
Before herding, people in the region hunted wild goats. The bones at Ganj Dareh still look wild, with large body size and big scimitar-shaped horns, and show none of the size reduction or twisted horns of later domestic goats. A 2021 genome study found that a minority of the animals at the sites were genetically wild, which suggests that hunting continued alongside herding.
How it works
The evidence for management lies in which animals were killed. Only about 20 percent of goats lived past four years. Between 60 and 70 percent of males were culled before two and a half years, while 60 to 70 percent of females survived beyond that age, the pattern of a herder keeping breeding females. Bones of newborn animals show that goats gave birth at the settlement, and mud bricks from Ganj Dareh carry goat hoofprints. Long runs of identical DNA in the genomes point to mating among relatives, a mark of controlled herds.
What lasted
The 2021 study, published in PNAS, reported the oldest livestock genomes then known. The main group of Zagros goats sits at the base of the family tree of all other domestic goats, and Ganj Dareh held the full range of maternal lineages found in domestic goats today. The genomes showed no early selection for coat color or other domestic traits, so management came about 1,000 years before visible physical change.
Where it stands today
Goats remain an important livestock species worldwide. The Zagros finds are central to current research on how animal domestication began, as a long process of human control over herds rather than a single event. The authors describe a process without an initial genetic bottleneck, in which herders drew on a diverse stock of animals.
