Revealing Earliest Animal Domestication in the Fertile Crescent

Introduction

Animal domestication is a key topic in Neolithic archaeological research since the early 1960s. The earliest steps of this phenomenon are, still today, very difficult to achieve.

Challenges in Traditional Analyses

Traditional zooarchaeological analyses used to date domestication rely on detecting the appearance of genetically-driven morphological changes in animals. These morphological markers, however, if they occur at all, only appear after the process is well underway, after hundreds, if not thousands, of years, making it difficult to study them.

The READ Project

The READ project will build an alternative approach to detect early evidences of sheep and goat management. The project will investigate the historical life traits of the animals with a high-resolution time analysis by performing biogeochemical analyses on fossil teeth.

Scientific Approaches

Scientific approaches employed are not all highly innovative, but their combination together with the themes addressed will involve a high gain. This will allow reconstructing the three clue mechanisms that were pivotal in the lead up to domestication:

1. The control of the animals’ reproductive cycles
2. The induced changes to their feeding habits
3. The interruption of migratory-seasonal movements

Regional Evaluation

The project will evaluate and compare data from what are known to be the three key regions for this research area:

• The Southern Levant
• The Northern Levant
• The Eastern Fertile Crescent

READ will analyze a set of the most important and significant available faunal assemblages for these regions and will put together a reference dataset from wild relatives available in museum collections and current living populations found in breeding centers.

Conclusion

At the end of the project, I will unravel the current unresolved paradigms on the origin of animal domesticates not relying on how the animals changed but rather on what the human societies did to change the animals; revealing how early caprine management was done and where and when processes of animal domestication were initiated.