[Domestication and its sequelae]

The domestication of the dog took place in the late Glacial. Its earliest record comes from Oberkassel near Bonn and its age is some 14000 years B.C. On the other side the domestication of the farm animals began about 10000 years ago, during the so-called Neolithic Revolution, when man's way of life changed basicly from the hunter-and gatherer-culture to agriculture and animal husbandry. This change took place in the valleys and on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the basin of the Euphrat and Tigris rivers which is called the Fertile Crescent. Sheep and goat were succeeded by pig and cattle. Immediately after the transition to domestication with protection by human being taking the place of natural selection the livestock animals and the dog underwent a decrease in size. This reduction in size is one of the most important criteria for distinguishing prehistoric domestic livestock from their wild forms. In high developed cultures domestication resulted in a hardly imaginable morphological and physiological extension of variability, in a richness of forms not to be guessed by the whole potential of the corresponding ancestors. But all these rich appearing forms were due to intraspecific procedures. They don't create new species. By the way of the increasing influence of man and its domestic animals on the environment the procedure of domestication is more and more shifted in the foreground and increasingly intervenes with the interests of wild life.