Domestic goats descend from the bezoar ibex’s wild stock
Genus Capra holds ten goat species, from markhor to several ibexes. Farm goats (Capra hircus) derive from the bezoar ibex. Mountain athletes, they climb bare rock on sparse forage and differ from sheep (Ovis) partly by scent glands close to the feet and other caprine tells.
The farm goat is among the oldest domesticated animals: archaeology puts its first taming in Iran about 10,000 years ago, from the bezoar, a subspecies of the wild goat. People wanted its hair, meat and milk, and until the Middle Ages goatskins served as travellers' bottles for water and wine and, in some regions, as parchment.
Wild goats live in mountains, scaling bare rock and getting by on thin vegetation. Compared with sheep they have scent glands by the feet, around the groin and ahead of the eyes but lack other facial glands; some grow beards, and they carry hairless calluses on their front knees. Like cattle and antelope they are bovids, and as ruminants they chew the cud, using a four-chambered stomach to digest, bring up and re-digest food.
Where the genus ends has shifted. Some authors folded in sheep and the Barbary sheep; others shrank it so far that only two species remained, the markhor and everything else. Current practice usually recognises nine wild species, among them the Siberian, Iberian and Nubian ibexes and the East Caucasian tur, plus the domestic goat. Mitochondrial DNA suggests the Asian and Nubian ibexes are not close kin of the similar-looking Alpine ibex, which groups with the Iberian, and that the West Caucasian tur sits nearer the wild goat than its eastern namesake.
Almost all the wild species keep to separate ranges. Only two pairs overlap, the wild goat with the East Caucasian tur and the markhor with the Siberian ibex, and they rarely hybridise in nature, yet in captivity every Capra species can cross and produce fertile young.
Source: Capra (genus)
