Now, an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and zooarchaeologists from LMU Munich and the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) has deciphered the prehistoric cultural trajectory of this species by analyzing 118 genomes recovered from archaeological bones dating across 12 millennia and stretching from Mongolia to Ireland.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

The earliest sheep-herding village in the sample, Aşıklı Höyük in central Türkiye, has genomes that seem ancestral to later populations in the wider region, confirming an origin in captures of wild mouflon over 11,000 years ago in the western part of the northern Fertile Crescent.

By 8,000 years ago, in the earliest European sheep populations, the team found evidence that farmers were deliberately selecting their flocks—in particular for the genes coding for coat color. Along with a similar signal in goats, this is the earliest evidence for human molding of another animal's biology and shows that early herders, like today's farmers, were interested in the beautiful and unusual in their animals.

Specifically, the main gene the team found evidence of selection near was one known as "KIT," which is associated with white coat color in a range of livestock.