From dogs to humped cattle: how humans tamed animals, and Balochistan’s part

Morning milk, afternoon meat, a woollen shawl for winter, an ox pulling the plough in the field and a dog guarding the door. We forget that all these animals were once wild. How did humans make them companions? The story begins in the last part of the Ice Age, and one important chapter of it was written in Balochistan.

What is domestication?

Making a wild animal a pet or farm animal is not just catching it and tying it up. It is a process lasting generations in which breeding comes under human control. Over time, the animals’ bodies, temperament and even their DNA become different from those of their wild ancestors.

According to the American archaeologist Melinda Zeder, animals were not domesticated suddenly. First, hunting methods changed. Then people began looking after herds. Physical changes appeared several hundred years after that.

The first companion: the dog

Scientists agree that the dog was the first animal kept by humans. It is the only animal that had become domesticated before farming began. It descends from the wolf. But when and where this happened is still debated.

Some remains from Europe, 14,000 years old or even older, show dog-like physical features. At Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, a dog about 14,300 years old was found buried with two humans. Its bones show signs of an illness that would have been fatal without long human care.

In March 2026, two new papers were published in Nature. In one, the DNA of an animal about 15,800 years old from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye was found to match that of dogs. A sample about 14,300 years old from Gough's Cave in the United Kingdom also turned out to be a dog. The second paper found DNA from a 14,200-year-old dog in Switzerland. According to these studies, dogs had by then spread widely across Europe and Anatolia. Until then, the earliest certain genetic evidence of a dog was only about 10,900 years old. The Pınarbaşı sample is therefore the oldest known genetic evidence so far.

Some experts go back even further. A 2021 study compared the genetic histories of humans and dogs. It suggested that dogs were probably domesticated in Siberia about 23,000 years ago and then reached the Americas with humans. Another study, in 2020, found that at least five major ancestral lineages of dogs had separated by 11,000 years ago.

Goat, sheep, cow and pig

Several thousand years after the dog, it was the turn of grazing animals in the Fertile Crescent. This covers the hill country of present-day Türkiye, Syria, Iraq and Iran. According to Zeder's 2008 review, goats, sheep, cattle and pigs all came under human management between about 11,000 and 10,000 years ago.

Bones about 9,900 years old from Ganj Dareh, a hill site in Iran, show that people there kept regular herds of goats. Males were slaughtered young, while females were kept alive for longer. The earliest signs of keeping sheep and pigs have been found in south-eastern Anatolia, and of keeping cattle in the upper Euphrates region. Genetic research has also confirmed that the wild ancestors of domestic sheep and goats come from this region.

These animals soon began to travel with humans. According to Zeder, around 10,500 years ago people crossed about 60 kilometres of sea in boats to reach Cyprus. They took all four animals with them.

Mehrgarh and the humped cattle

Mehrgarh, on the Kachhi Plain in Balochistan, is the oldest known farming settlement in north-western South Asia. Domestic animals were present there from the very first period, and most were West Asian in character. But one animal was specific to this region: the humped cow, or zebu. According to researchers, the local wild breed of the area was domesticated soon after the settlement was established.

Experts do not agree on the date of Mehrgarh's first period. Jean-François Jarrige, who led the excavation, believed it began around 8000 BC. A 2025 study based on new radiocarbon dates from teeth puts its start between about 5200 and 4900 BC.

The horse and milk

Not every animal was domesticated so early. According to research published in Nature in 2021, the homeland of today's domestic horses is the steppe of the lower Volga and Don rivers. These horses spread rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC.

Animals also changed the human body. According to National Geographic, as cattle keeping spread in Europe, a genetic change became common that allowed adults to digest raw milk.

In life today

Domesticating animals gave humans a steady source of food, hides and wool, and animals to ride and carry loads.

Today, when a shepherd in a village leads out a flock of goats, or a farmer yokes a humped ox to the plough, he is carrying forward this partnership of thousands of years. Its early traces are also preserved in the soil of Mehrgarh.