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would have required much higher human population densities, many more pigs in village herds, and regular exchanges of animals from one community to another. Such transactions would have been laden with social consequences in societies where individually owned animals were a novelty.
    Full domestication involving the exclusive breeding of domestic herds may have taken many generations to achieve, especially when people and pigs competed, as they did, for cereal crops that were the staple of farming communities throughout Southwest Asia. This may be why pigs—which were, after all, prized mainly for their meat and for their social value—came fully into their own only after goats and sheep had become the farm animals of choice from Turkey to Egypt and beyond. 4
    Mouflon and Bezoar
    The hunters walk openly across the grassy clearing in the morning sun, wrapped up well against the chill. Deep shadows give way to bright sunlight where the mouflon flock grazes peacefully, the red brown of their coats glowing softly in the still-tentative warmth. A ram with magnificent, curling horns looks up uninterestedly at the familiar visitors, who pass close to the nearest ewes. One of the females moves slowly up to the men and almost nudges a young man armed with a bow and arrow. He reaches down to pet her head, but she moves away, lingering a few meters off, totally unafraid. The flock moves closer, still grazing as the hunters walk slowly away. No one in the group remarks on the close
encounter, for they see it virtually every time they approach the sheep in clear view. There’s an easy familiarity between mouflon and human.
    Neither wild goats nor sheep are dangerous or frightening prey; nor, as far as we know, did they inspire mythic tales of danger and fierce attacks in the past. As with other ungulates, their defense was to flee, and then only when they perceived an imminent threat. Those who hunted them had observed their prey for generations and knew well that walking unthreateningly in the open rarely alarmed the flocks.
    Today’s goats and sheep retain qualities that may have been more marked ten millennia ago. John Mionczynski is a modern-day expert on goat packing. He takes his beasts far into the backcountry of the western United States—they are strong, hardworking, and disciplined animals. 5 Above all, he says, they are friendly and very adaptable, comfortable in cold landscapes and in semiarid terrain. Goats are inquisitive creatures, so much so that Mionczynski and many others have experienced wild goats and sheep walking right up to them in remote places. Like humans, caprines are gregarious and intensely curious. They are more intelligent than many people believe and also recognize both other beasts and individual people after repeated encounters. These qualities could have enhanced close contacts between wild goats, sheep, and humans at a time of drought and enhanced propinquity across desiccated landscapes. A form of easy coexistence could have developed that led, almost inevitably, to domestication. No one knows why people turned to sheep and goats, but like Hallan Çemi’s pigs, they may have created flocks and herds as a form of what we would call risk management against food shortages.
    The ancestors of today’s goats and sheep still survive today in remote mountainous terrain, though it is decimated by centuries of intensive hunting. The West Asiatic mouflon, the wild sheep, was a native of a wide area of southwestern Asia, including Turkey and the Caucasus Mountains, even the Balkans, where it disappeared three thousand years ago. 6 Mouflon are agile beasts, predominantly grazers, well adapted to steep terrain. In contrast, the stocky Persian wild goat, sometimes calledthe bezoar, is at home amid cliffs and rugged slopes, using its climbing ability to escape predators. Bezoar are browsers and grazers, capable of exploiting a wider range of foods than the mouflon. Both wild goats and