The Animals We Tamed

Among the first animals ever domesticated, sheep were bred circa 9000 to 8500 BC from the wild mouflon of the Fertile Crescent, giving pastoral peoples a walking supply of wool, milk and meat that could thrive on land too poor for crops.

Goats were domesticated circa 8500 BC from the bezoar ibex of the Zagros mountains, at the same deep date as sheep, and convert scrub and steep ground no other livestock can use into milk, meat and hair.

The pig was domesticated from the wild boar independently in two places: circa 8500 BC in Anatolia and circa 6000 BC in China, an omnivore that fattens on scraps, mast and surplus grain.

Bred down over millennia in Northeast Africa circa 5000 to 3000 BC (the exact center and date still debated), the donkey remains the world's most common and least celebrated pack and draft animal, hardier and cheaper to keep than the horse.

Domesticated circa 3500 BC on the western Eurasian steppe, the horse transformed transport and war before it transformed the farm: heavy horse breeds, the horse collar and the steel plough broke the deep prairie soils of North America and Europe in the nineteenth century.

Domesticated circa 3000 BC or earlier, with its river and swamp types tamed separately on the Indian subcontinent and in China or Southeast Asia, the water buffalo powers rice paddies from the Indus to the Mekong and supplies most of the dairy of India, Pakistan and the original mozzarella of Italy.

Hive beekeeping is attested in Egypt by circa 2600 BC, but the western honey bee was never fully domesticated in the genetic sense; today its real agricultural weight is pollination, with managed hives trucked between orchards and fields to set fruit, nuts and seed for dozens of crops.

The domestic duck, dated to roughly the 2nd millennium BC in Southeast Asia and mostly bred from the mallard, is worked directly into rice farming across East and Southeast Asia, where ducks are driven through the paddies to eat pests and weeds after the rice is established.

Descended from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia and domesticated circa 1500 BC by recent estimates, the chicken became in the twentieth century the object of the most intensive selective breeding in agriculture, and now supplies more meat than any other land animal.

Domesticated by peoples of Mesoamerica well before European contact, the turkey was carried back across the Atlantic only after 1492, becoming a major farmed meat bird in Europe and, above all, the centerpiece of the North American Thanksgiving table.