Domestication | 187 and animals, then the humans act as the elders The animal is removed from where, in the wild, it learns from birth either to hunt or to flee on sight from any potential predator The tamed animal is brought into a protected place where it has to learn a whole new set of social relationships, as well as new feeding and reproductive strategies and, under domestication, this culture is passed down from generation to generation A domestic animal is a cultural artifact of human society, but it also has its own culture, which can develop, say, in a cow, either as part of the society of nomadic pastoralists or as a unit in a factory farm Domestic animals live in many of the same diverse cultures as humans, and their learned behavior has to be responsive to a great range of different ways of life In fact, so closely many domestic animals fit with human cultures that they seem to have lost all links with their wild progenitors The more social or gregarious in their natural behavioral patterns are these progenitors, the more versatile will be the domesticates, with the dog being the earliest animal to be domesticated (around 14,000 years ago), and an extreme example of an animal whose culture has become humanized It is not fully understood why the broad domestication of livestock animals, these being sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and equids in the Old World and camelids in South America, occurred progressively from 8,000 years ago, but this was the basis of the so-called Neolithic revolution when the fundamental change in human societies occurred, and groups of huntergatherers became farmers and stockbreeders Archaeologists in the past have hypothesized that there was a natural progression first from generalized or broad- spectrum hunting in the Paleolithic era, at the end of the last ice age, to specialized hunting and herd following of, for example, reindeer or llama It was believed that this stage was then followed by control and management of the herds, then to controlled breeding, and finally to artificial selection for favored characteristics However, the sequence would very rarely have been so smooth, for the social implications of ownership by a social group of hunter-gatherers are a bigger hurdle to domestication than they may seem Many hunter-gatherer societies that could have domesticated animals never did so, and this was probably for cultural as much as for many other complicated reasons Why, for example was the bighorn sheep never domesticated in North America? Tim Ingold has argued that for huntergatherer societies there is no conceptual distance between humanity and nature, and the boundary is easily crossed The animals in the environment of the hunter act with the hunter in mind and present themselves to him The hunter believes that if he is good to the animals they will be good to him, and if he maltreats them, the animals will desert him Animals to be hunted are not seen as wild, but as individuals that allow themselves to be taken The best known survival of this belief is seen among the Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan, who still practice a bear sacrifice in which a bear cub is nurtured for months and then killed in an elaborate and ancient ritual In the pre-domestication world, humans and animals lived in mutual trust, but all is changed by the herding of animals and even more so by full domestication Herdsmen care for their animals, but it is quite different from the care of the hunter, because equality is lost and domination takes over from trust By