Management and domestication of cattle (Bos taurus) in Neolithic Southwest Asia

Abstract

The dominant narrative describing cattle domestication places its origin within the early farming settlements of the Fertile Crescent region of SW Asia dating to the ninth millennium BC (a period known as the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B [PPNB]) (Figure 1; Table 1). However, we argue that this narrative is based on models which imagine a single geographic center of innovation and emphasize biometric evidence for body size diminution, i.e., the history of “domestic cattle” rather than “cattle management.” We critique this narrative arguing that the appearance of “domestic cattle” in the ninth millennium BC is largely a mirage and that domestic phenotypes in fact appear in the eighth millennium BC. However, the management of cattle must have preceded changes in phenotype and likely emerged a millennium or more earlier across a wide geographic region including much of the northern and southern Levant— temporal and geographic patterns that fit with recent interpretations of the histories of other livestock species (e.g., Zeder and Hesse, 2000; Martin and Edwards, 2013).