Daly, Kevin G., Mattiangeli, Valeria, Hare, Andrew J., Davoudi, Hossein, Fathi, Homa, Doost, Sanaz Beizaee, Amiri, Sarieh, Khazaeli, Roya, Decruyenaere, Delphine, Nokandeh, Jebrael, Richter, Tobias, Darabi, Hojjat, Mortensen, Peder, Pantos, Alexis, Yeomans, Lisa, Bangsgaard, Pernille, Mashkour, Marjan, Zeder, Melinda A., and Bradley, Daniel G. 2021. "Herded and hunted goat genomes from the dawn of domestication in the Zagros Mountains." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118, (25). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100901118.
The Aceramic Neolithic (similar to 9600 to 7000 cal BC) period in the Zagros Mountains, western Iran, provides some of the earliest archaeological evidence of goat (Capra hircus) management and husbandry by circa 8200 cal BC, with detectable morphological change appearing similar to 1,000 y later. To examine the genomic imprint of initial manage-ment and its implications for the goat domestication process, we analyzed 14 novel nuclear genomes (mean coverage 1.13X) and 32 mitochondrial (mtDNA) genomes (mean coverage 143X) from two such sites, Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein. These genomes show two distinct clusters: those with domestic affinity and a minority group with stronger wild affinity, indicating that managed goats were genetically distinct from wild goats at this early horizon. This genetic duality, the presence of long runs of homozygosity, shared ancestry with later Neolithic populations, a sex bias in archaeozoo-logical remains, and demographic profiles from across all layers of Ganj Dareh support management of genetically domestic goat by circa 8200 cal BC, and represent the oldest to-this-date reported livestock genomes. In these sites a combination of high autosomal and mtDNA diversity, contrasting limited Y chromosomal lineage diversity, an absence of reported selection signatures for pigmenta-tion, and the wild morphology of bone remains illustrates domesti-cation as an extended process lacking a strong initial bottleneck, beginning with spatial control, demographic manipulation via biased male culling, captive breeding, and subsequently phenotypic and genomic selection.
