About the Lecture

Around the turn of the current millennium, the domestication of the four animals that we continue depend on today, sheep, goat, cattle and pig, was viewed as a rapid, intentional process that started in one small region in southeastern Anatolia and then spread to many parts of Eurasia from there. Over the past quarter century, new research increasingly suggests that plant agriculture emerged gradually in many locations within the eastern Mediterranean region in response to local conditions. Although most researchers have embraced this new multiregional perspective, published narratives on animal domestication continue to highlight a core-periphery explanation. Here, I present evidence from my research projects in Central Anatolia, the southern Levant and Greece to build a case for a more gradual multiregional scenario for the emergence of sheep and goat domestication. The evidence emphasizes diverse pathways to animal domestication that were deeply influenced by local ecology and social conditions, and the transmission of information across large social networks. I conclude by discussing how ultimately, farming began to spread from Anatolia to Europe, making one of its first stops at Franchthi Cave on the coast of the Peloponnese in Greece.

About the Speaker

Natalie Munro is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona (Ph.D.-2001), Simon Fraser University (M.A.-1994) and Southern Methodist University (B.S-1991). In 2001-02 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. Munro is a zooarchaeologist who studies foraging and early farming societies in the greater Mediterranean Basin using ancient animal remains. She has a special interest in the formative conditions of agricultural communities, the emergence of animal management and its spread from Southwest Asia into Europe. She connects large zooarchaeological databases from individual sites to broader evolutionary themes such as human demography, animal domestication, sedentarization, and the emergence of public ritual practice at a regional scale. Munro has active research projects in Türkiye, Israel and Greece and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, PNAS, Current Anthropology, and Journal of Human Evolution. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Free admission