Old Goat Urine Reveals How Anatolian Farmers Have Tamed Their Flocks | Science

Buried in the ruins of an ancient village in central Turkey, next to tools and garbage, are the body wastes of people – and goats – who lived there 10,000 years ago. While dung was used as fuel and as a construction material, urine salts remain trapped in sediment layers under the village. At present, archaeologists have used these salts to recreate parts of the village's 1000-year history, including its 500-year-old process of partial domestication of animals.

Archaeologists do not normally look for urine salts, but because of the aridity of central Turkey and the plaster floors of old buildings that protected the dirt, the researchers thought some of them might linger in the dust of the site, called Aşıklı Höyük.

They were not disappointed. They found large concentrations of salts in each sediment layer at Aşıklı Höyük, revealing how many mammals, whether human or not, had settled in the village since about 8450 BC. at 7450 BC The researchers estimated how much human waste should have been produced based on the number of houses excavated in each layer. Scientists say that the remaining urine salts indicate the number of sheep or goats that lived in the village or nearby.

During the first hundred years of the village, when the men of Anatolia were just beginning to abandon the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers, very little extra salt appeared, but was enough for a few animals at a time. But over the next 400 years, sheep and goats living in Aşıklı Höyük have multiplied by about 10 every two or three centuries, the team said today. Progress of science.

In the most recent layer, starting around 7900 BC BC, the villagers seem to have moved their herds to the outskirts of the colony, where there were more sheep and goats than the estimated 500 to 1,000 people who lived in the village. This movement suggests that villagers had slowly moved from capturing some wild animals to breeding and selecting a large group of semi-domesticated animals. But the slowness of this movement suggests to researchers that this domestication process probably began by accident.