Animal domestication: from distant past to current development and issues

Abstract

Domestic animals have played an important role in shaping human Evolution and History. After millennia of constructing niches based on hunting, gathering, and foraging, a range of communities in diverse parts of the world embarked on trajectories of food production which in some instances led to the emergence of complex societies, urbanism, and empires, sowing the seeds for our current globalization. Thanks to intensive zooarcheology and genomics research, it is now common knowledge that, apart from dog domestication within hunter–gatherers societies around 23,000 years Before Present (BP) terminus post quem (Perri et al., 2021), the domestication of globally important livestock animals occurred within sedentary communities engaged in early agriculture in three independent cradles.