Τhe domestication of southwest Asian ‘farmyard animals’: possible insights from management of feral and free-range relatives in Greece

Understanding early animal domestication is complicated by disagreement over what, in cultural terms, differentiates domestic (closely managed? privately owned?) from wild and by the difficulty of distinguishing these categories zooarchaeologically. We describe recent feral populations of goats, sheep, cattle and pigs in Greece, comprising descendants of animals escaped or released from controlled domestic herds but remaining in private ownership. Many such animals are systematically exploited for meat by trapping or driving, while provision of fodder or water, especially as bait for traps but also to shape their movements, blurs the distinction between wild and domestic. Selective culling (mainly of young males) of goats, sheep and cattle confirms previous concerns regarding zooarchaeological use of mortality data to detect domestic management but also suggests that such data might help to identify private ownership of animals. Applying these observations to mortality data for goats and sheep from early Neolithic southwest Asia, we argue that some animals previously interpreted as early herded domesticates may instead represent trapped and selectively culled wild individuals in private ownership. In conclusion, we consider whether and why private ownership of free-range animals may quite widely have preceded classic domestic control of goats, sheep and perhaps cattle in southwest Asia.