The first pets appeared in the Stone Age. The fact that people started using wild animals and their descendants for their own way of life has profoundly influenced society. For example, if the people of Eurasia hadn't bred the horse from the wild horses that roamed there some five thousand years ago, history would have been very different.
In everyday parlance, by “pet” we simply mean animals that live close to us in the house. Also included are caged wild animals such as a snake or a desert fox brought from the Sahara. Biologists, however, use a different definition:they use it to describe animals and their descendants that man took from the wild, which reproduce under his supervision, and from which he also expects something, even if it is only cuddly.
It is not about whether the animals are tame or not. Think of a runaway herd of cattle in a classic western; they are not tame, but they do have an essential characteristic of domestic animals in the biological concept, and that is the regulated reproduction under human supervision. Biologists therefore do not call the Asian elephant used as a pack animal a pet. Reproduction and growth of elephants are laborious processes and people prefer to catch young elephants to train them for work than to become dependent on cultivation.
A group of pets can look very different. A Chihuahua is tiny, a Saint Bernard huge. Yet they both descend from the same wild ancestor, the wolf. Shetlanders, warm-blooded riding horses and Dutch/Belgian draft horses all have the wild horse as ancestor. The notable differences in tissues, organs, physique, color, plumage, hair and fur, behavior, and so forth between pets and their progenitors depend on how long ago domestication began, and how intensively humans interfered with the reproduction of the species concerned.
The dog
The oldest pet archaeologists have found is the dog. Until recently, this pet was believed to have originated in Eurasia at the end of the Old Stone Age, some 14,000 years ago. However, recent research suggests that the dog appeared 18,000 years earlier. It is disputed how and why the wolf was made into a dog. Because of the help with the hunt, because they wanted a guard dog, a living blanket for the cold nights or just a companion animal? According to the latest insights, the first dogs may have served as pack animals.
The cause of these differences is the change in crop choice due to domestication. Living beings differ from each other because of differences in their heredity carriers or genes. Some live longer because of these differences, have more reproductive success and start to crowd out less fortunate brothers and sisters, so that the genes of the latter disappear. In nature, this process proceeds along the lines outlined by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) in his theory of evolution. This process is different for pets, animals in captivity that reproduce under human supervision.
For example, stress-sensitive animals reproduce less well in captivity. Man takes the young under his wing and protects less healthy or powerful animals, which are more likely to be endangered in nature and less likely to have offspring. Animals that do not care for each other in the wild are forced to mate in captivity. Their guards also cross certain animals with each other, for example to make a pig with shorter legs and a wider body:then the animal produces proportionally more chops. Darwin knew the mechanism of artificial crop selection and used it as a model for his "natural selection", the engine of evolution. He assumed that nature, as it were, does what happens during domestication.
Goat, sheep, pig, beef
About 2.6 million years ago, creatures that are considered humans appeared in Africa, and about 200,000 years ago today's humans, Homo sapiens, arose on that same continent. The early humans lived as hunter-gatherers until about ten thousand years ago. Then they became farmers and shepherds. Domesticated plants such as grains and pets gradually took on a special role in their lives.
For our part of the Old World, the domestication of three mammals that would play an important economic role in the Near East began 9,500 years ago:from the wild goat and the mouflon came goat and sheep, from the wild boar the pig. A fourth important species followed 8000 years ago:then the domestic cattle arose from the wild cattle, also called aurochs, although that is actually an incorrect name. An ox is a castrated bull. People prefer to speak of primal cow. It is understandable that the cow only became a pet at a late stage, because a primeval cow was a big star.
Domesticated grain crops, pottery to easily store food, permanent settlements and the origin of the four domestic animals mentioned are sometimes called the Neolithic package and the origin of this package is called the Neolithic Revolution. How and why this 'revolution' took place is unclear.
I personally like to use the following scenario. People in the Near East are going to store surpluses of wild grains in simple silos. Women, children and the elderly continue to live in the silos and the population is increasing, if only because women can now care for more small children more easily than when they moved around. Wild grains begin to be planted, which leads to their domestication. Wildlife disappears around the settlements; here people go hunting extra, among other things to protect the fields.
Game is taken elsewhere to breed it under supervision. The scenario underlines that Neolithization was a gradual process, starting with an "invention" (domestication) whose consequences were not foreseen. Similar scenarios can be designed for areas other than the Near East. The first pets spread and were adopted by all kinds of human groups. The knowledge that pastoralists gained through contact with them undoubtedly aided later domestications. For example, the chicken probably originated about 5000 years ago in Southeast Asia from the wild chicken or Bankiva chicken. At about the same time, just before the beginning of the time of the pharaohs, the Egyptians made the wild ass a beast of burden and a mount.
Far-reaching consequences
People who domesticated animals, of course, initially only had their own advantage in mind. However, their work had more far-reaching consequences. In that sense, domestication has functioned as the motor of history. In the long run, this applied to the first pets mentioned above
The wild horse was originally mainly found in the dry grasslands of Eurasia. Based on finds in Kazakhstan, archaeozoologists suspect that this animal has been domesticated for about 5,500 years. They were first used for slaughter, but soon as mounts. Horses have long played a special role in raids and war. Just think of the Asian equestrian peoples that ravaged Europe, but also of the knights from the Middle Ages. Until well into the 19th century, horses and armies were inextricably linked.
The animal also had an unforeseen influence in the New World. Domestic horses, taken by the Spaniards, were adopted by the Native Americans of North America and profoundly changed the way of life of many tribes; essentially like the car changed our way of life.
Other animals that helped shape modern society were the brown rat and the common mouse. They play an important role as laboratory animals. We conclude this incomplete list with two insects:the honeybee, indispensable for the fertilization of cultivated crops, and the silkworm, the caterpillar of the silk or mulberry butterfly. This one was domesticated in China, perhaps 5000 years ago. When such a caterpillar falls off the mulberry, her food plant, the grower sometimes has to place her back on the plant himself.
The mutual dependence of pets and humans does not imply that all pets (in the biological definition) are loved. Livestock farmers are especially interested in their own animals; from the Neolithic Revolution they alienated the wildlife. This process of alienation continues. Nowadays, a new process of alienation is also taking place. Midas Dekker already pointed out in his book Het edelgedierte (1982) the contrast between the pets in factory farming and our often spoiled companion animals 'meow' and 'wafwaf'. We become alienated from the pets that disappear from our sight, such as the slaughter cattle, but at the same time we cannot live without them.