Revisiting biogeography of livestock animal domestication

Abstract

Human society relies on four main livestock animals - sheep, goat, pig and cattle, which all were domesticated at nearly the same time and place. Many arguments have been put forward to explain why these animals, place and time were suitable for domestication, but the question - why only these, but not other animals, still does not have a clear answer. Here we offer a biogeographical perspective: we survey global occurrence of large mammalian herbivore genera around 15 000 - 5 000 years before present and compile a dataset characterising their ecology, habitats and dental traits. Using predictive modelling we extract patterns from this data to highlight ecological differences between domesticated and nondomesticated genera. The most suitable for domestication appear to be generalists adapted to persistence in marginal environments of low productivity, largely corresponding to cold semi-arid climate zones. Our biogeographic analysis shows that even though domestication rates varied across continents, potentially suitable candidate animals were rather uniformly distributed across continents. We interpret this pattern as a result of an interface between cold semi-arid and hot semi-arid climatic zones. We argue that hot Semi-arid climate was most suitable for plant domestication, cold Semi-arid climate selected for animals most suitable for domestication as livestock. We propose that the rates of domestication across biogeographic realms largely reflect how much intersection between hot and cold Semi-arid climatic zones was available at each continent.