Domesticated animals

A domesticated animal is one belonging to a population whose behavior, life cycle, or physiology has been altered by many generations under human control. That is a fact about the population rather than about any individual animal, which is why a tamed wild creature is not domesticated and a feral descendant of livestock still is. The commodity is the animal itself: bred, counted, bought, sold, lent, pledged, and inherited.

Two dates matter and they are far apart. The dog comes first by a wide margin, somewhere between roughly thirty and fifteen thousand years ago, with the range genuinely contested. But the dog was taken up for cooperation rather than for consumption or traction, and a hunting companion is not a herd. What begins around 8500 BCE with sheep, goat, and cattle in Anatolia and the Zagros is the animal held in numbers:  the beast that can be tallied, divided among heirs, and driven to a buyer. Everything of consequence followed quickly—pigs and goats in the ninth and eighth millennia, cattle and zebu by about 8000 BCE, cats, chickens, guinea pigs, donkeys, ducks, water buffalo, honey bees, horses, and dromedaries across the next four thousand years, then silkmoths, reindeer, pigeons, geese, yaks, Bactrian camels, llamas, alpacas, and guineafowl. The list was essentially complete by 2400 BCE and has barely changed since, which makes this one of the very few categories here that stopped acquiring members four thousand years ago.

Its economics are unlike anything else on the list, because a domesticated animal reproduces itself. Every other commodity must be found, extracted, grown as an annual crop, or manufactured. A herd is a self-replenishing stock that is simultaneously an asset and an income: the animal is saleable at any time while yielding milk, wool, traction, dung, and offspring in the meantime. That is the definition of capital in the strict sense — something held for what it produces rather than consumed for what it is — and livestock is the oldest instance of it.

The linguistic evidence for that is unusually direct, and it runs through three branches of Indo-European independently. Proto-Germanic fehu meant livestock and broadened to wealth; Old Norse fé is livestock and loose assets, Old English feoh is livestock and money, and English fee descends from it, with Swedish faü, Dutch vee, and German Vieh alongside. Latin pecus meant livestock and gave pecunia, money. Sanskrit paśu is livestock. Three families arrived separately at a word for wealth built on a word for cattle, which is about as close as etymology comes to establishing an economic fact. For an atlas that follows the history of capital, this is where capital starts.

The boundaries all turn on bred against wild, and on the animal against what it yields. A wild boar is fish and game and a pig is here; the wild animal and its flesh belong there, the bred animal here. What a living animal produces is a livestock product — milk, eggs, dung — while its skin, fur, and feathers after slaughter are hides and feathers, and its wool and hair are fibers. Several members are kept for one specific output: the silkmoth, domesticated in China around 3000 BCE, is here while the filament it spins is silk, and the honey bee is here while honey is a sweetener and beeswax belongs with oils, gums, resins, and waxes. Draft animals — ox, horse, donkey, camel — are here, while hauling for hire is a service or freight transport. People are never in this category under any circumstances; that is slaves. And the plant counterpart has no single category: cultivated crops are grains and produce, and cultivated flowers are ornamental plants.