Domesticating Animals in Africa: Implications of Genetic and Archaeological Findings
By D. Gifford-Gonzalez, O. Hanotte. 2011
241 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Domestication is an ongoing co-evolutionary process rather than an event or invention. Recent zooarchaeological and animal genetics research has prompted a thorough revision of our perspectives on the history of domestic animals in Africa. Genetic analyses of domestic animal species have revealed that domestic donkeys are descended from African ancestors, opened a debate over the contribution of indigenous aurochs to African domestic cattle, revealed an earlier and possibly exogenous origin of the domestic cat, and reframed our vision of African dogs. Genetic diversity studies and mapping of unique traits in African cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens indicate adaptations to regional environmental challenges and suggest hitherto unknown and complex patterns of interactions both among Africans and with Southwest Asia and other Asian regions on the Indian Ocean. This article argues against the static perspective on domestication as invention and for viewing it as a dynamic, locally based and continuing process.
Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Food Science, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9572514b58ef015cc62e62b4b5531f172290b6e
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Citations in the corpus
- On the history of cattle genetic resources (2014, background): “Paleontological remains found in the western Egyptian Desert dating from 9000 BP suggested an independent African center of domestication, but the domestic origin of the bones is disputed [30,32,33,36].”