For Over 11,000 Years, Sheep Have Been Deeply Connected To Human Survival

For over 11,000 years, sheep have been deeply connected to human survival and way of life. Their meat and domestication have led to humans being fed and clothed.
Sheep provide nourishment through protein-rich milk and warmth through water-resistant fabrics made from their wool.
A team of researchers has traced back prehistoric human interactions with this species by analyzing 118 genomes from bones that date across 12 millennia and were found in areas from Mongolia to Ireland.
The earliest sheep-herding village was Aşıklı Höyük in central Turkey. It has genomes that appear to be ancestral to later populations in the wider region, confirming that wild sheep were originally captured over 11,000 years ago in the western part of the northern Fertile Crescent.
The team found evidence that farmers were intentionally picking sheep for their flocks based on coat colors by 8,000 years ago.
It is the oldest evidence of humans shaping the biology of another animal, proving that even prehistoric herders were interested in beautiful and unique animals, just like the farmers of today.
The main gene that the researchers found evidence of selection was near one called “KIT,” which is associated with a white coat color in livestock.
By that time, the earliest domestic sheep genomes from Europe, Iran, and Central Asia had diverged from one another.
But this did not last long because people began translocating sheep from the east to the west. Around 7,000 years ago, sheep genomes moved west within the Fertile Crescent, in line with human cultural influences spreading out from Mesopotamia.

Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
Pastoralist peoples in the Eurasian steppes also traveled west about 5,000 years ago, transforming ancient European culture and human populations.
“One of our most striking discoveries was a major prehistoric sheep migration from the Eurasian steppes into Europe during the Bronze Age. This parallels what we know about human migrations during the same period, suggesting that when people moved, they brought their flocks with them,” said Dr. Kevin Daly, the first author of the research.
The massive migration was driven by sheep herding and the utilization of products like milk and cheese. It occurred around the same time that sheep ancestries were changed. By the Bronze Age, herds had about half their ancestry from the Eurasian steppes.
Overall, the findings demonstrate how the relationship between humans and sheep has evolved over thousands of years.
Since the early days of domestication, sheep have been incredibly important in the development of human culture and the economy.
“Our study, while convincingly reconciling morphological and genomic evidence of the geographic origin of domestic sheep, clearly illustrates that further transdisciplinary research is needed to clarify the patterns of dispersal and selection of the many landraces occurring today in Eurasia and Africa,” said Joris Peters, a co-author of the study.
The research was published in Science.
More About:Animals