Through isolation and/or mutation, sheep differentiated into almost 1,000 breeds, most with regional distributions. Some of these have now disappeared as more productive breeds have taken their places. The selection of sheep breeds in Western Europe has been influenced largely by the strong Western bias toward high productivity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the breeds of Cheviot, Cotswold, Dorset, Hampshire, Leicester, Oxford, Romney, Shropshire, Suffolk, and Southdown all emerged in the British Isles, bred in some cases for their wool and in others primarily for their meat. The Rambouillet, a smooth-bodied wool breed, originated in France. In the United States, the breeds of Columbia, Debouillet, Montalde, Panama, and Targhee were developed (mostly in the twentieth century) through crossing of different breeds to adapt them to North. American environmental conditions.
About 10 percent of classified breeds produce fine wool. Merino sheep are the outstanding source of high-quality wool and, as such, are the most important of all sheep breeds. The long fibers of Merino wool are turned into yarn used for worsted apparel. The history of Merino sheep in Spain is well documented after about A. D. 1500, but their origin is not. It seems most plausible, however, that this breed was brought from North Africa during the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula.
Genotypic and phenotypic diversity of sheep is greatest in the Near East, where these animals have been part of human livelihoods longer than anywhere else in the world. Breeds of indigenous origin, well adapted to the local environmental conditions, still dominate there. Some breeds, such as the Awassi and Karaman, have fat tails - fat tails being a much-appreciated delicacy in places such as the Middle East; others have semifat tails (e. g., Chios sheep); still others have thin tails, for example, the Karayaka of Turkey. Fat-rumped breeds form yet another category. Near Eastern breeds have several kinds of fleece, or none at all. The good-quality carpet wool yielded by some breeds makes possible the manufacture of Oriental rugs, one of the world’s magnificent art forms. Fur-sheep are another category; most famous are lamb pelts from Karakul sheep produced in the Middle East and central Asia, especially in Bokhara, where this breed originated. Many sheep of western Asia also have their variants in Africa (Epstein 1971).
In places where sheep are raised more for their subsistence value, numerous breeds may be represented in a single flock. For example, in northeastern Brazil, an owner may keep hair sheep and those with wool; polled sheep and those carrying horns; sheep with colors ranging from red-brown to white to black-pied; sheep with horizontal ears, but also those with lop ears; sheep with thin tails, but also those with semifat tails. These heterogeneous mixtures are the result of several introductions and free crossings over time. The first sheep were exported to Brazil in the sixteenth century from Portugal and included both the coarse-wooled Churro and the fine-wooled Merino. The Crioulo breed, coarse-wooled and horned, emerged from the Churro. Hair sheep were imported from the Caribbean and elsewhere, and in the twentieth century, sheep were brought from Italy to Brazil.
World History
