PERSPECTIVE Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact Melinda A. Zeder* Archaeobiology Program, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013 Edited by Jeremy A. Sabloff, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA, and approved May 27, 2008 (received for review March 20, 2008) The past decade has witnessed a quantum leap in our understanding of the origins, diffusion, and impact of early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin. In large measure these advances are attributable to new methods for documenting domestication in plants and animals. The initial steps toward plant and animal domestication in the Eastern Mediterranean can now be pushed back to the 12th millennium cal B.P. Evidence for herd management and crop cultivation appears at least 1,000 years earlier than the morphological changes traditionally used to document domestication. Different species seem to have been domesticated in different parts of the Fertile Crescent, with genetic analyses detecting multiple domestic lineages for each species. Recent evidence suggests that the ex- pansion of domesticates and agricultural economies across the Mediterranean was accomplished by several waves of seafaring colonists who established coastal farming enclaves around the Mediterranean Basin. This process also involved the adoption of do- mesticates and domestic technologies by indigenous populations and the local domestication of some endemic species. Human envi- ronmental impacts are seen in the complete replacement of endemic island faunas by imported mainland fauna and in today’s anthropogenic, but threatened, Mediterranean landscapes where sustainable agricultural practices have helped maintain high bio- diversity since the Neolithic. archaeology ͉ livestock he transition from foraging and fusion, and impacts of domesticates and therein). Rather than domestic status, hunting to farming and herding agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin, sex is the primary factor affecting body is a significant threshold in hu- outlining our current understanding of size in these ungulates, manifested by a man history. Domesticates and these developments and highlighting marked and consistent difference be- T tween larger males and smaller females the agricultural economies based on promising areas for future study. them are associated with radical restruc- in essentially all skeletal elements. Envi- turing of human societies, worldwide Initial Animal Domestication in the ronment also strongly influences body alterations in biodiversity, and signifi- Fertile Crescent size, with increasing heat and aridity cant changes in the Earth’s landforms Until the late 1990s archaeozoologists positively correlated with smaller size. and its atmosphere. Given the momen- relied on morphological changes in tar- What archaeozoologists had originally tous outcomes of this transition it comes get species to identify where and when interpreted as body size reduction asso- as little surprise that the origin and wild prey animals were transformed into ciated with initial domestication can now be attributed to differences in the spread of domesticates and the emer- herded livestock (2). A proposed sharp culling strategies of herders as opposed gence of agriculture remain topics of and rapid reduction in overall body size to hunters. In most prey species, hunters enduring interest to both the scholarly among archaeological prey populations focus on large adult animals (particu- community and the general public. was the most widely accepted morpho- larly males) to maximize return, and the The past decade has seen remarkable logical marker of this threshold (3, 4). bones of these larger animals generally analytical advances in documenting do- Based on this size reduction criterion, dominate in prey assemblages generated mestication (1), particularly in tracking the established consensus was that ani- by hunters. Archaeological assemblages the domestication of four major Near mal domestication (beginning with goats generated by herders, on the other Eastern livestock species (sheep, goats, and then sheep) occurred at ca. 10,000– hand, are usually dominated by the cattle, and pigs) and their subsequent 9,500 B.P.†, Ϸ1,000 years after the bones of smaller females slaughtered dispersal throughout the Mediterranean domestication of crop plants in the after their prime reproductive years. Ex- Basin. New morphometric methods are southern Levant (3, 5). Domestication of cess males not needed for herd propaga- tracking changes in human prey strate- these two animal species was thought to tion were harvested at young ages and gies that mark the transition from hunt- have occurred somewhere to the north their more friable bones are usually less ing to herding. Genetic analyses bring and east of the heartland of plant do- well represented in these assemblages. fresh insights into initial livestock mestication (5), although a second, inde- Although the linkage between domes- domestication and their dispersal. Small- pendent domestication of goats was tication and body size was called into sample atomic mass spectrometry proposed for the southern Levant (6). radiocarbon dating provides refined The utility of this size reduction chronological frameworks for these de- marker, and indeed of all morphological This article grew out of a presentation given by M.Z. at the Calpe 2007 Symposium: People in the Mediterranean–A velopments. These recent analytical markers, has come under increasing History of Interaction, September 27–30, 2007, the Gibraltar advances, in turn, have produced an ex- scrutiny (7). My own work on both mod- Museum, Gibraltar. plosion of new information that is call- ern skeletal collections and archaeologi- Author contributions: M.A.Z. designed research, per- ing into question prevailing hypotheses cal caprine (sheep and goat) remains formed research, synthesized research in referenced publi- about the origin and early spread of ani- from the Near East finds little support cations, and wrote the paper. mal domesticates and the Neolithic life- for the almost axiomatic acceptance that The author declares no conflict of interest. ways of which they were a part. Here, I domestication results in an automatic This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. bring together these different sources of overall reduction in body size in man- *E-mail: [email protected]. information to consider the origins, dif- aged animals (ref. 8 and references †All dates are reported in calibrated years before present. www.pnas.org͞cgi͞doi͞10.1073͞pnas.0801317105 PNAS ͉ August 19, 2008 ͉ vol. 105 ͉ no. 33 ͉ 11597–11604 Downloaded by guest on September 27, 2021 question by this research, the marked degree of sexual dimorphism in caprines it documented offered another approach to tracking the transition from hunting PIGS SHEEP to herding. Pronounced differences in 10,000 10,500 the size of male and female skeletal 10,000 11,000 8,500 CATTLE GOATS 10,000 elements make it possible to separate 8,500 11,000 archaeological assemblages into 9,600 9,000 sex-specific subpopulations, which, based 10,500 10,500 on a refined understanding of the se- 10,500 10,500 10,000 quence and timing of long bone fusion 9,000 (9), can be used to generate high- 9,600 9,500 resolution harvest profiles for male and 9,000 8,500 female animals capable of distinguishing 8,500 8,500 the prey strategies of hunters from the 8,500 harvest strategies of herders. Application of this approach to ar- chaeological assemblages from Iraq and Fig. 1. The origin and dispersal of domestic livestock species in the Fertile Crescent. Shaded areas show Iran has identified the clear signature of the general region and the approximate dates in calibrated years B.P. in which initial domestication is a managed herd of goats (harvesting of thought to take place. Dates outside of the shaded areas show the approximate date when the domes- young males and prolonged survivorship ticate first appears in a region. Orange, goats (Capra hircus); blue, sheep (Ovis aries); green, cattle (Bos of females) at the site of Ganj Dareh in taurus); fuscia, pigs (Sus scrofa). highland Iran (8). Directly dated to 9,900 B.P., the goats from this site show no evidence of size reduction or any elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent are slower, to that of sheep (Fig. 1) (10, 14). other domestication-induced morpholog- detecting parallel patterns to those doc- Morphologically altered domestic pigs ical change. Smaller body size and umented in the Zagros. Changes in the are not found in the southern Levant or changes in the size and shape of horns age of harvested caprines, and possibly lowland Iran until ca. 8,500–8,000 B.P. [a morphological change clearly linked demographically driven changes in size Recent demographic evidence suggests to domestication (2)] appear 500–1,000 consistent with early herd management, that taurine cattle were initially domesti- years later than this demographic shift, are found in southeastern Anatolia at cated somewhere in the upper Eu- when managed animals were moved ca. 10,500 B.P. (12). Sheep seem to be phrates Valley between ca. 11,000 and from the natural habitat of wild goats the initial early focus of the transition 10,000 B.P. (15), but, like sheep and and introduced into hotter and more from hunting to herding in this region, pigs, they arrived relatively late in more arid lowland Iran. These follow-on mor- with managed goats arriving from out- distant parts of the Fertile Crescent phological changes likely reflect re- side the area at ca. 10,200 B.P. (12). (Fig. 1). Morphologically altered domes- sponses to new selective pressures, plus Similarly, demographic evidence for the tic pigs and cattle are not found in Cen- the now more limited opportunities for management of morphologically unal- tral Anatolia until after 8,500 B.P. (16). introgression between managed and wild tered caprines (mostly sheep) is found in Genetic data from modern and ar- animals or the restocking of herds with Central Anatolia between 10,400 and chaeological specimens both support wild animals. 9,400 B.P.