The Wild Goats Of Lebanon: Evidence For Early Domestication?

Abstract

This article discusses the biogeography of Persian wild goat in an attempt to identify the most likely early centres of goat domestication in the Levant. It is suggested that Persian wild goat may have been first domesticated in or immediately adjacent to the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains during the mid-tenth millennium BP (uncalibrated), approximately a millennium earlier than has been previously assumed. Goat domestication may therefore have first occurred at approximately the same time as early Neolithic sedentary agricultural communities first emerged in the moist steppe zones of the central and southern Levant.