The Domestication of Animals Was an Early Step Towards Civilization
The first step on the path to settling down that led to civilization was the domestication of animals. Around the end of the last ice age, Middle Eastern hunters in the mountains of modern Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, started to keep some game animals close at hand. It was a protracted process that began by learning to manage flocks of wild sheep. By then, humans had tamed some particularly friendly wolves. Over succeeding generation, they learned to train and breed them, resulting in the emergence of man’s best friend, the dog.
The knowledge that was gained from the domestication of dogs was tried out on other animals. Such attempts were unsuccessful more often than not, because most animals can at best be tamed as individuals, but not domesticated as a species. However, some animals have behavioral characteristics and social structures that lend themselves to domestication. By carefully exploiting those traits, some hunter-gatherers managed to successfully domesticate goats and sheep, and transformed what had once been herds of wild game into docile flocks.
