Nubia and Sudan in general was quite the pioneer in many ways. Wasn't it also a pioneer in regards to cattle domestication and pottery? Wallahi, our folk don't get the rep they deserve. Everyone's too erect for our Masri cousins.
Pottery is an interesting case. The ceramic pots used to secure food and cooking were found earliest over 10,000 BP in Sudan (Dotted Wavy Line, and Wavy Line) by hunter-gatherer/fisher peoples – this was, from a time perspective, millennia earlier than the Levant and adjacent eastern culture/subsistence transition lineages. What is important to note in this matter, pottery uncovered in China dated 20,000 years old.
Due to deteriorating pasture conditions, demographic selection went toward a wild direction in recurrent pulses throughout the generations indicated in a complex multistage process due to the animals dying, the causative agent put forth by environmental pressures decreasing the carrying capacity of the geographic place. The patterns of selection in this landscape trigger for a need to increase robusticity, greater size, wild physiological/morphological and behavioral edge that can withstand harsh conditions, so such selection mechanisms, in my opinion, needs to trigger to defend against drought conditions as well as disease resistance. What is put weight upon is the idea that domestication is neither linear nor iterative.
Stable directional selection placement or isolation is needed, and people in the Late Pleistocene were not sedentary. This meant as they moved, the aurochs might have mixed continuously with their wild counterpart and retained wild-like characteristics – this might in a contradictory way given them an edge for the specific heterogeneous diverse subsistence lifestyles of a moving people with seasonal sedentary settlement situation where there was some nice frequency adaptation for the animal to cope with both sides, multi-specialized behavioral spectrum. The latter is just a thought. This model presents new dynamic variation inter-play; I believe the ideas we have been informed by not-so-representative sedentary faring observations in the modern era. It lacks proper explication.
And if that happened, we can be looking at a longer time window that stretches millennia before the known agricultural correlational domestication where you see traditional co-evolutionary dynamics among those animals, guided by various mechanisms that lead to size reduction and behavioral change. In these kinds of fields, people, especially the experts, have this way of underestimating something that pre-supposes and often potentially overturns their semi-coherent narrative, but when the object of discussion is backed by undeniable evidence, everyone suddenly acts like it was a matter of fact all along -- there is a sort of powerful hindsight bias people with operating in these inter-disciplinary discussional spheres carry that is limiting the discussion for no good reason. Frankly, it is a mode of operation to save face and retain large egos giving them room to dictate the parameters of discussion favoring their antiquated ideas, at the same time, posing as forward-thinking people that “only follows where the evidence leads them”.
Size reduction is not a useful indicator of signs of early domestication. There were regional variations, the Egyptian long-horn cattle had size that overlapped with the wild cattle population.
Before they officially took up cattle domestication, our ancestors relied upon diversified economic subsistence strategies that were increasingly delayed return and not immediate or egalitarian, as many think. One massive evidence of this is, again conveniently, the use of pottery. The second is, of course, the environmental conditioning, which I think was harsh, unpredictable with regards to precipitation, and hard extremely to live outside specific areas because of punishing aridification.
Morphological change of distinct physiological and/or behavioral domesticatory characteristics is not required. That bar is unrealistic to meet. Conveniently to draw a parallel, the donkey was morphologically wild (still retains wild qualities to this day) several thousand years post-domestication. The conversation around why this is the case is complex and multi-faceted, heterogeneous factors that centrally coordinate to one point, that is, for survival reasons of the early pastoralist. Phenotypical morphology indicative of wild adaptation can stay latent. A reasonable factor can be a lack of stable isolation given the mobile-dependent lifeways which presented issues for possible long-term directional control, at the same time, having a wild edge early on was possibly the best thing because the earliest extent in conditions and used the animals for reasons that helped them specifically.
I think Tuaregs still capture feral animals to domesticate them, and I seem to remember once reading that Bejas encourage introgression between domesticated and wild counterparts across the region to produce for better fitness traits according to the needs of demands from the environmental conditionings, better diseases resistance and, of course, for strength and endurance. It has been proven that, without selective breeding, directional selection might not happen even without gene flow from a wild population.
