Where Do Goats Come From?

This chapter describes the history and biodiversity of the goat species, whose worldwide distribution demonstrates its great adaptability to a wide range of environmental conditions. We explain the genomic evidence clarifying the contribution of wild ancestors, the dynamics of the domestication process, and the post-domestication evolutionary history of this species, also reviewing the signals that both natural and human-mediated selection have left in goats’ genomes. Animal welfare is related to the mental and physical state of a single subject, whereas genomic tools deal with populations. Hence, in the context of genetics, the concept of “fitness” depends on the interaction between genotype/phenotype and environments and is estimated as the individual’s contribution of descendants to the next generation. During the domestication process, goats adapted to a new environment created by human activities and that differed substantially from the natural conditions in which they evolved. Similar to what happens in the natural context, also under anthropogenic conditions an increase in fitness comes at a cost, i.e., the morphological and physiological changes induced by the adaptation to human management and to the new environmental and nutritional conditions, which likely generated stress in the animals, particularly at the beginning of the process.