Do we know anything about how early humans captured/tamed the animals that we know today as domestic species?
How old is the earliest record of domestication of animals?
Did domestication of various animal species just kind of happen as a result of human interaction or did it require effort to "befriend" cows, sheep, cats, etc.? Horses still require "breaking" or training in modern times before they'll tolerate a rider, for example.
Thanks - hope this is the right sub for this, I've been wondering about this lately.
Domestication of animals is generally a prehistoric phenomenon, and is thus better suited to /r/AskAnthropology.
I second the pointer to the anthropologists, but will just say that what I gathered from The Horse, the Wheel, and Language is that horses would have first been domesticated as food rather than transport. Their value was that they apparently know to break through the ice to get to drinking water and that they can forage through deeper snow, neither of which sheep/goats do.
I have also seen cats described as "self-domesticating" - they started hanging around our settlements because we had pest-attracting grain stores, and we tolerated them because they hunted those pests. Over time they became more acculturated to us without any selection by humans.