Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What was the first animal to be domesticated by humans?
The dog was the first domesticated vertebrate,[9][10][11] and was established across Eurasia before the end of the Late Pleistocene era, well before cultivation and before the domestication of other animals.[10] The archaeological and genetic data suggest that long-term bidirectional gene flow between wild and domestic stocks – including donkeys, horses, New and Old World camelids, goats, sheep, and pigs – was common.[7][12] Given its importance to humans and its value as a model of evolutionary and demographic change, domestication has attracted scientists from archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology, botany, zoology, genetics, and the environmental sciences.[13] Among birds, the major domestic species today is the chicken, important for meat and eggs, though economically valuable poultry include the turkey, guineafowl and numerous other species. Birds are also widely kept as cagebirds, from songbirds to parrots. The longest established invertebrate domesticates are the honey bee and the silkworm. Terrestrial snails are raised for food, while species from several phyla are kept for research, and others are bred for biological control.
Thus, Palmer argues that humans are not normally required to aid wild animals in need. The philosopher Joel MacClellan, a critic of intervention, challenges Palmer on three grounds: first, he says that the difference between our obligations to domestic and wild animals in Palmer's thought experiments could be justified on scientific, rather than moral, grounds; second, he challenges Palmer's characterisation of wildness as a relationship, rather than a capacity, arguing that a description of an animal as wild likely conveys that the animal has certain capacities lacked by domestic animals; and, third, he suggests that just as a utilitarian approach to wild animal suffering may "demand" too much, Palmer's contextual approach may "permit" too much, by allowing the policing of nature. The affinities between utilitarian and contextualist approaches, MacClellan argues, come from their shared idea of what is and is not valuable. The pro-intervention philosopher Catia Faria criticises Palmer's argument from the other direction. Faria challenges Palmer's account by pointing to the counter-intuitive conclusions it would reach, Faria claims, in cases of assisting humans with whom an individual does not have significant relationships. Unless Palmer is willing to deny that humans have obligations to help suffering distant humans, Faria argues, the account cannot justify not aiding animals.
Domestication differs from taming. Taming is the conditioned behavioral modification of a wild-born animal when its natural avoidance of humans is reduced and it accepts the presence of humans, but domestication is the permanent genetic modification of a bred lineage that leads to an inherited predisposition toward humans. Human selection included tameness, but domestication is not achieved without a suitable evolutionary response. Domestic animals need not be tame in the behavioral sense, such as the Spanish fighting bull. Wild animals can be tame, such as a hand-raised cheetah. A domestic animal's breeding is controlled by humans and its tameness and tolerance of humans is genetically determined. Thus, an animal bred in captivity is not necessarily domesticated; tigers, gorillas, and polar bears breed readily in captivity but are not domesticated. Asian elephants are wild animals that with taming manifest outward signs of domestication, yet their breeding is not human controlled and thus they are not true domesticates.
Commensal pathway animals include dogs, cats, fowl, and possibly pigs. The dog is a classic example of a domestic animal that likely traveled a commensal pathway into domestication. The dog was the first domesticant and was domesticated and widely established across Eurasia before the end of the Pleistocene, well before cultivation or the domestication of other animals. Ancient DNA supports the hypothesis that dog domestication preceded the emergence of agriculture and was initiated close to the Last Glacial Maximum 27,000 YBP when hunter-gatherers preyed on megafauna, and when proto-dogs might have taken advantage of carcasses left on site by early hunters, assisted in the capture of prey, or provided defense from large competing predators at kill-sites. The wolves most likely drawn to human camps were the less aggressive, subdominant pack members with lowered flight response, higher stress thresholds, and less wariness around humans, and therefore they were better candidates for domestication. The earliest sign of domestication in dogs was the neotenization of skull morphology and the shortening of snout length that results in tooth crowding, reduction in tooth size, and a reduction in the number of teeth, which has been attributed to the strong selection for reduced aggression. This process may have begun during the initial commensal stage of dog domestication, even before humans began to be active partners in the process.
The prey pathway was the way in which most major livestock species entered into domestication as these were once hunted by humans for their meat. Domestication was likely initiated when humans began to experiment with hunting strategies designed to increase the availability of these prey, perhaps as a response to localized pressure on the supply of the animal. Over time and with the more responsive species, these game-management strategies developed into herd-management strategies that included the sustained multi-generational control over the animals’ movement, feeding, and reproduction. As human interference in the life-cycles of prey animals intensified, the evolutionary pressures for a lack of aggression would have led to an acquisition of the same domestication syndrome traits found in the commensal domesticates.
Certain animal species, and certain individuals within those species, make better candidates for domestication than others because they exhibit certain behavioral characteristics: (1) the size and organization of their social structure; (2) the availability and the degree of selectivity in their choice of mates; (3) the ease and speed with which the parents bond with their young, and the maturity and mobility of the young at birth; (4) the degree of flexibility in diet and habitat tolerance; and (5) responses to humans and new environments, including flight responses and reactivity to external stimuli. Reduced wariness to humans and low reactivity to both humans and other external stimuli are a key pre-adaptation for domestication, and these behaviors are also the primary target of the selective pressures experienced by the animal undergoing domestication. This implies that not all animals can be domesticated, e.g. a wild member of the horse family, the Zebra.
The most frequently diagnosed form of scabies in domestic animals is sarcoptic mange, caused by the subspecies "Sarcoptes scabiei canis", most commonly in dogs and cats. Sarcoptic mange is transmissible to humans who come into prolonged contact with infested animals, and is distinguished from human scabies by its distribution on skin surfaces covered by clothing. Scabies-infected domestic fowl suffer what is known as "scaly leg". Domestic animals that have gone feral and have no veterinary care are frequently afflicted with scabies and a host of other ailments. Nondomestic animals have also been observed to suffer from scabies. Gorillas, for instance, are known to be susceptible to infection by contact with items used by humans.
The domestication of animals is the mutual relationship between animals and the humans who have influence on their care and reproduction. Charles Darwin recognized the small number of traits that made domesticated species different from their wild ancestors. He was also the first to recognize the difference between conscious selective breeding in which humans directly select for desirable traits, and unconscious selection where traits evolve as a by-product of natural selection or from selection on other traits. There is a genetic difference between domestic and wild populations. There is also such a difference between the domestication traits that researchers believe to have been essential at the early stages of domestication, and the improvement traits that have appeared since the split between wild and domestic populations. Domestication traits are generally fixed within all domesticates, and were selected during the initial episode of domestication of that animal or plant, whereas improvement traits are present only in a proportion of domesticates, though they may be fixed in individual breeds or regional populations.
A study by Queen Mary University reports that goats try to communicate with people in the same manner as domesticated animals such as dogs and horses. Goats were first domesticated as livestock more than 10,000 years ago. Research conducted to test communication skills found that the goats will look to a human for assistance when faced with a challenge that had previously been mastered, but was then modified. Specifically, when presented with a box, the goat was able to remove the lid and retrieve a treat inside, but when the box was turned so the lid could not be removed, the goat would turn and gaze at the person and move toward them, before looking back toward the box. This is the same type of complex communication observed by animals bred as domestic pets, such as dogs. Researchers believe that better understanding of human-goat interaction could offer overall improvement in the animals' welfare. The field of anthrozoology has established that domesticated animals have the capacity for complex communication with humans when in 2015 a Japanese scientist determined that levels of oxytocin did increase in human subjects when dogs were exposed to a dose of the "love hormone", proving that a human-animal bond does exist. This is the same affinity that was proven with the London study above; goats are intelligent, capable of complex communication, and able to form bonds. Despite having the reputation of being slightly rebellious, more and more people today are choosing more exotic companion animals like goats. Goats are herd animals and typically prefer the company of other goats, but because of their herd mentality, they will follow their owners around just the same.
The middle of the 20th century saw a turn away from zoogeography (while never fully relinquishing it) towards questions about and interest in the impact of humans on wildlife and in human relations with livestock. Two key geographers shaping this wave of animal geography were Carl Sauer and Charles Bennett. Sauer’s interest in the cultural landscape – or cultural ecology (how human cultures are shaped and are shaped by their environment) – necessarily involved addressing the topic of animal domestication. In Sauer’s research he focused on the history of domestication, and how human uses of livestock shaped the landscape (via fencing, grazing, and shelters). Bennett called for a ‘cultural animal geography’ that focused on the interactions of animals and human cultures such as subsistence hunting and fishing. The shift from the first wave to the second wave of animal geography had to do with the species being studied. Second wave animal geography brought domesticated livestock into the view instead of just focusing on wildlife. For the next several decades animal geography, as cultural ecology, was dominated by research into the origins of domestication, cultural rituals around domestication, and different cultures livestock relations (sedentary versus nomadic herding). Key works include Simoons and Simoons’ "A Ceremonial Ox of India", Gades’ work on the guinea pig, and Cansdale’s "Animals and Man". Baldwin provides an excellent overview of second wave animal geography research.
The commensal pathway was traveled by vertebrates that fed on refuse around human habitats or by animals that preyed on other animals drawn to human camps. Those animals established a commensal relationship with humans in which the animals benefited but the humans received no harm but little benefit. Those animals that were most capable of taking advantage of the resources associated with human camps would have been the tamer, less aggressive individuals with shorter fight or flight distances. Later, these animals developed closer social or economic bonds with humans that led to a domestic relationship. The leap from a synanthropic population to a domestic one could only have taken place after the animals had progressed from anthropophily to habituation, to commensalism and partnership, when the relationship between animal and human would have laid the foundation for domestication, including captivity and human-controlled breeding. From this perspective, animal domestication is a coevolutionary process in which a population responds to selective pressure while adapting to a novel niche that included another species with evolving behaviors.
About 430 (97%) of the species cultured were domesticated during the 20th and 21st centuries, of which an estimated 106 came in the decade to 2007. Given the long-term importance of agriculture, to date, only 0.08% of known land plant species and 0.0002% of known land animal species have been domesticated, compared with 0.17% of known marine plant species and 0.13% of known marine animal species. Domestication typically involves about a decade of scientific research. Domesticating aquatic species involves fewer risks to humans than do land animals, which took a large toll in human lives. Most major human diseases originated in domesticated animals, including diseases such as smallpox and diphtheria, that like most infectious diseases, move to humans from animals. No human pathogens of comparable virulence have yet emerged from marine species. 
Due to the somewhat unclear outlines of what, precisely, constitutes domestication, there are some species that may or may not be fully domesticated. There are also species that are extensively used or kept as pets by humans, but are not significantly altered from wild-type animals. Most animals on this second table are at least somewhat altered from wild animals by their extensive interactions with humans. Many could not be released into the wild, or are in some way dependent on humans.
"Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships" presents the four stages of human-animal relationship history: separation (when humans began to consider themselves as fundamentally separate from animals), pre-domestication (rich in symbolic expression of animals), domestication (exploiting and taming animals for human use), and post-domestication (our current industrialized consumption and separation from domestic animals).
It is proposed that there were three major pathways that most animal domesticates followed into domestication: (1) commensals, adapted to a human niche (e.g., dogs, cats, fowl, possibly pigs); (2) prey animals sought for food (e.g., sheep, goats, cattle, water buffalo, yak, pig, reindeer, llama, alpaca, and turkey); and (3) targeted animals for draft and nonfood resources (e.g., horse, donkey, camel). The dog was the first to be domesticated, and was established across Eurasia before the end of the Late Pleistocene era, well before cultivation and before the domestication of other animals. Unlike other domestic species which were primarily selected for production-related traits, dogs were initially selected for their behaviors. The archaeological and genetic data suggest that long-term bidirectional gene flow between wild and domestic stocks – including donkeys, horses, New and Old World camelids, goats, sheep, and pigs – was common. One study has concluded that human selection for domestic traits likely counteracted the homogenizing effect of gene flow from wild boars into pigs and created domestication islands in the genome. The same process may also apply to other domesticated animals.
The domestication of animals began with the wolf ("Canis lupus") at least 15,000 years before present (YBP), which then led to a rapid shift in the evolution, ecology, and demography of both humans and numerous species of animals and plants. The sudden appearance of the domestic dog ("Canis lupus familiaris") in the archaeological record was followed by livestock and crop domestication, as well as the transition of humans from foraging to farming in different places and times across the planet.
Monty and friends travel to the eastern empire of Far Kathay to find the stolen jade shoes of the Green Idol of Ommm.The animals featuring in the series are primarily species native to England, though more exotic species are occasionally mentioned. The first book explains that in the years following the disappearance of all humans, the animals of Welkin, both those wild and once domesticated, made their way into the abandoned castles and villages, using what the humans had left behind.
Gradually the animals learned to speak human language and, to an extent, use human tools. While some of the animals were content to live in the forest, the mustelids in particular adapted to a more civilized way of living.
The otters and mink took to the riverways; the badgers kept to the subterranean territories; the pine martens stayed in the trees; of the remaining weasels, stoats, and now-feral ferrets, the stoats were the most ambitious and aggressive, and took control of Welkin.
The dog was the first domesticated animal, and was domesticated and widely established across Eurasia before the end of the Pleistocene, well before the cultivation of crops or the domestication of other animals. The dog is often hypothesised to be a classic example of a domestic animal that likely traveled a commensal pathway into domestication. Archaeological evidence, such as the Bonn-Oberkassel dog dating to ~14,000BP, supports the hypothesis that dog domestication preceded the emergence of agriculture and began close to the Last Glacial Maximum when hunter-gatherers preyed on megafauna. 
The wolves more likely drawn to human camps were the less-aggressive, subdominant pack members with lowered flight response, higher stress thresholds, and less wary around humans, and therefore better candidates for domestication.
Proto-dogs might have taken advantage of carcasses left on site by early hunters, assisted in the capture of prey, or provided defense from large competing predators at kills. However, the extent to which proto-domestic wolves could have become dependent on this way of life prior to domestication and without human provisioning is unclear and highly debated. In contrast, cats may have become fully dependent on a commensal lifestyle before being domesticated by preying on other commensal animals, such as rats and mice, without any human provisioning. Debate over the extent to which some wolves were commensal with humans prior to domestication stems from debate over the level of human intentionality in the domestication process, which remains untested.
Since 2012, a multi-stage model of animal domestication has been accepted by two groups. The first group proposed that animal domestication proceeded along a continuum of stages from anthropophily, commensalism, control in the wild, control of captive animals, extensive breeding, intensive breeding, and finally to pets in a slow, gradually intensifying relationship between humans and animals.
Self-domestication is the process of adaptation of wild animals to humans, without direct human selective breeding of the animals. The biological processes in the evolution of humans and human culture are also referred to by the term "self-domestication".
The beginnings of animal domestication involved a protracted coevolutionary process with multiple stages along different pathways.[7] It is proposed that there were three major pathways that most animal domesticates followed into domestication: (1) commensals, adapted to a human niche (e.g., dogs, cats, fowl, possibly pigs); (2) prey animals sought for food (e.g., sheep, goats, cattle, water buffalo, yak, pig, reindeer, llama and alpaca); and (3) targeted animals for draft and nonfood resources (e.g., horse, donkey, camel).[7][12][18][34][35][36][37] The dog was the first domesticant,[10][11] and was established across Eurasia before the end of the Late Pleistocene era, well before cultivation and before the domestication of other animals.[10] Humans did not intend to domesticate animals from, or at least they did not envision a domesticated animal resulting from, either the commensal or prey pathways. In both of these cases, humans became entangled with these species as the relationship between them, and the human role in their survival and reproduction, intensified, leading eventually to a formalised animal husbandry.[7] Although the directed pathway proceeded from capture to taming, the other two pathways are not as goal-oriented and archaeological records suggest that they took place over much longer time frames.[13]
"Artificial selection" is the controlled breeding of domestic plants and animals. Humans determine which animal or plant will reproduce and which of the offspring will survive; thus, they determine which genes will be passed on to future generations. The process of artificial selection has had a significant impact on the evolution of domestic animals. For example, people have produced different types of dogs by controlled breeding. The differences in size between the Chihuahua and the Great Dane are the result of artificial selection. Despite their dramatically different physical appearance, they and all other dogs evolved from a few wolves domesticated by humans in what is now China less than 15,000 years ago.
Domestication should not be confused with taming. Taming is the conditioned behavioral modification of a wild-born animal when its natural avoidance of humans is reduced and it accepts the presence of humans, but domestication is the permanent genetic modification of a bred lineage that leads to an inherited predisposition toward humans. Human selection included tameness, but without a suitable evolutionary response then domestication was not achieved. Domestic animals need not be tame in the behavioral sense, such as the Spanish fighting bull. Wild animals can be tame, such as a hand-raised cheetah. A domestic animal's breeding is controlled by humans and its tameness and tolerance of humans is genetically determined. However, an animal merely bred in captivity is not necessarily domesticated. Tigers, gorillas, and polar bears breed readily in captivity but are not domesticated. Asian elephants are wild animals that with taming manifest outward signs of domestication, yet their breeding is not human controlled and thus they are not true domesticates.
Throughout history not only domestic animals as pets and livestock were kept in captivity and under human care, but also wild animals. Some were failed domestication attempts. Also, in past times, primarily the wealthy, aristocrats and kings collected wild animals for various reasons. Contrary to domestication, the ferociousness and natural behaviour of the wild animals were preserved and exhibited. Today's zoos claim other reasons for keeping animals under human care: conservation, education and science.
The dog is a classic example of a domestic animal that likely traveled a commensal pathway into domestication. The dog was the first domesticant, and was domesticated and widely established across Eurasia before the end of the Pleistocene, well before cultivation or the domestication of other animals. It may have been inevitable that the first domesticated animal came from the order of carnivores as these are less afraid when approaching other species. Within the carnivores, the first domesticated animal would need to exist without an all-meat diet, possess a running and hunting ability to provide its own food, and be of a controllable size to coexist with humans, indicating the family "Canidae", and the right temperament with wolves being among the most gregarious and cooperative animals on the planet.