Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
make cheese. Archaeologists have found evidence that goats were being kept, rather than
hunted, about 10,000 B.C. at Ganj Dareh, a Neolithic village in western Iran. Mounds of do-
mestic goat bones unearthed at Jericho have been carbon-dated to 7000 to 6000 B.C.
DNA findings released in 2001 suggest goats may have been domesticated in other regions of
the world as well. Gordon Luikart of the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France, and
his colleagues speculate that another goat strain found in the Indian subcontinent, Mongolia,
and Southeast Asia is descended from a she-goat tamed about 9,000 years ago in an area of
Pakistan called Baluchistan, in the Indus Valley. Archaeological evidence suggests that
Baluchistan was a major center of domestication. A third unrelated strain, of as a yet-undeter-
mined origin, is believed to have been the ancestor of today's Swiss, Mongolian, and Sloveni-
an breeds.
Domestic goats are thought to have shaped the development of human civilization by provid-
ing a portable supply of meat and milk that allowed hunter-gatherers to become agricultural
nomads. Goats were small, easy to handle, and able to thrive in arid, semi-tropical and moun-
tainous areas where horses, cattle, and other larger herbivores could not survive. Their skins
supplied leather and pelts for robes and rugs. The woolly fur of goats was woven into the
earliest cloth, and goat horns were made into drinking vessels, ornaments, and musical instru-
ments. Goats carried their owners' belongings on their backs or pulled them on sledges as
they traveled from region to region. Young kids were used as sacrificial animals for religious
rites. Goats achieved mythical stature as fertility gods; the Greek god of forests and flocks,
Pan, was born with the legs, tail, and horns of a goat; and the Teutons believed that the chariot
of Thor, the thunder god, was pulled through the heavens by two he-goats.
Domesticated goats spread west from the Fertile Crescent across Europe and eventually into
Great Britain, sometimes escaping and establishing feral populations in remote areas where
they can still be found. Today, goats are the third most plentiful animals in the world. The es-
timated world population of goats today is about 460 million, the majority of them in develop-
ing countries where goat products are common and widely valued.
More than half of the world's population drinks goat milk, although in the United States
goat's milk is only slowly gaining in popularity. Europeans have appreciated the special at-
tributes of goat's milk for generations, and products such as chèvre (goat's milk cheese), but-
ter, yogurt, and ice cream made from goat's milk are popular in European nations. Until about
400 years ago, goats surpassed cattle in Europe as the preferred milking animal, and in much
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