Within the archaeological context, the term animal domestication is often reduced to the processes leading to the domestication of food-producing animals during what is called the Neolithic revolution. This is understandable, because the development of active food production had the most profound impact on the development of mankind after the invention of tools and the use of fire. The fundamental impacts of animal domestication on human history are today mainly dealt with by cultural anthropology, but were part of human self-awareness from early on. The distinction of herder and hunter as part of the dichotomy between ‘civilized’ and ‘wild’ is already found in the cuneiform literature of Mesopotamia. Indeed, the domestication of certain animals is part of the transition from a foraging life to that of farming, which also includes the domestication of certain plants. There is no doubt that questions of when, where, why, and how people first domesticated these particular plants and animals are central to the understanding of the history and development of mankind and have received the attention of scholars and philosophers throughout the formation of human self-understanding. The present contribution will, however, not concentrate on these anthropocentric aspects of animal domestication. It will instead deal with domestication as a series of processes between humans and specific animals, which strongly depended on particular environments and on special ways of biological interference between the two sides and which had different results depending on the involved animal species.
World History
