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The domestication of plants and animals was triggered by the climatic changes and environmental transformations that happened after the Last Glacial Maximum’s peak about 21 thousand years ago and which proceed to this modern day. These changes made getting food hard. The first domesticate was the wolf (Canis lupus) at least 15 thousand years ago. The Younger Dryas (about 12.9 to 11.7 thousand years BP) was a period of extreme cold and aridity that put stress on Homo sapiens to enhance their foraging approaches. By the start of the Holocene from 11.7 thousand years ago, pleasant climatic conditions and growing human populations managed to small-scale plant and animal domestication, which provided humans to enlarge the food they were getting hunter-gathering.
Neolithic development began with agricultural societies developing in Eurasia, North Africa, and the Americas. In the Fertile Crescent, about 10 to 11 thousand years ago, zooarchaeology registers that pigs, sheep, goats, and taurine cattle were the first livestock to be domesticated.
At the Netiv Hagdud place in Israel, dating to 11.5 thousand BP, wild barley was the most popular plant food. The oldest doubtless domesticated grain is einkorn from Nevali Çori (Turkey), dating to about 10.5 thousand BP.
In the Americas, squash (Cucurbita pepo and C. moschata) was in the domesticated form in southern Mexico and northern Peru by approximately 10 to 9 thousand BP. Corn or maize (Zea mays) was first domesticated by indigenous peoples in Mexico about 10 thousand years ago and later was grown almost everywhere in the Americas.
By 8.5 to 8.0 thousand BP, millet (Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum) and rice (Oryza sativa) were domesticated in East Asia. Two thousand years later, indicine cattle were domesticated in what is today Baluchistan (Pakistan). In East Asia 8 thousand years ago, pigs were domesticated from wild boar that were genetically distinct from those found in the Fertile Crescent. The horse domesticated on the Central Asian steppe 5.5 thousand years ago. Both the hen in Southeast Asia and the cat in Egypt were domesticated 4 thousand years ago.
The maps below show the particular plant and animal species were first cultivated or domesticated.
