Where does Domestic goat come from?
The domestic goat comes from the Fertile Crescent, the arc of hills from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran to the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia. People there began herding wild bezoar ibex about 10,000 years ago, making the goat one of the first animals ever domesticated.
Herders at Ganj Dareh
The oldest known herded goats come from Ganj Dareh, a village site about 1,400 metres up in a side valley of the Gamasiab river in western Iran, lived in around 8200–7600 BC. The archaeologists Melinda Zeder and Brian Hesse read the herders' choices in the bones: most males were killed before two and a half years old, while most females were kept longer, for breeding. In 2021 ancient DNA showed these goats were already distinct from wild goats and ancestral to later domestic ones.
Across the Fertile Crescent
Ganj Dareh was not alone. In the same era people were also managing goats in the Upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys, the Levant and Anatolia, so domestication seems to have happened across the region rather than in one spot. Neolithic farmers kept goats for milk and meat, burned their dung as fuel and used their bones, hair and sinew for clothing, building and tools.
Why people say Switzerland
Goats look at home in the Alps, and Switzerland bred one of the world's most widespread dairy goats. The Saanen, named after the Saanen valley in the Bernese Oberland, is a productive white dairy breed now kept in more than eighty countries, over 900,000 animals in all. But Swiss goats too come from Southwest Asia. The bezoar ibex, the likely wild ancestor of all or most domestic goats, still lives in the Zagros Mountains and was once widespread in Anatolia.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Goat ↗ · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Saanen goat ↗
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