Domestic goat settlement in Africa

Abstract

After the African goat was mentioned in texts from Antiquity, the first European explorations of Africa contributed to little more information. The study of African goat genetic resources truly started at the beginning of the 20th Century during the European colonization. After the independences, the African states pursued the research. The African goats seem to originate from the Middle East, where the wild species, ancestor of the domestic ones, still live and where many archeozoological proofs of a domestication process, 8500 to 9000 years’ old, cari be found. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a domestication in situ cannot be ruled out. Available nomenclatures allow to distinguish two categories of the post-domestication evolution classification: primary populations, which seem to be the majority in Africa, and standardized breeds. The use of morpho-biometric indexes allows to distinguish sub-populations among African primary populations. With the sub-sternal slenderness index (IGs), one can distinguish brevipes goats (IGs=1) and longipes goats (lGs=1,5). The following scenario suggests a domestic goat settlement in Africa in two successive waves: a first wave, originating from the Middle East, with the brevipes population (IGs=1) spreading throughout Africa, and a second wave, probably originating also from the Middle East, with the longipes population (IGs=1,5) settling on both sides of the hottest tract, the thermie equator. Dwarf goats would have originated from the brevipes goats once there.