Sheep in arid landscape, southeastern Morocco.
Photo by J. Peters, LMU_SNSB
Domesticated animals are an embarrassment for creationists who believe that their god created all the animals for the convenience of mankind, because just about every domesticated animal (or plant for that matter) has been highly modified by selective breeding to make it suitable for whatever purpose it was domesticated for.
An intelligent god could have made them fit for purpose in the first place, if it had really created them for mankind's convenience. This shows that either the creation myth is wrong, or the creator god lacked the foresight to know what humans would be using the animals for. So, we've had to modify them, in some cases. almost beyond recognition as the descendants of their wild ancestors, to make them fit for purpose.
And it gets worse when we discover that the domestication process began long before the same creation myth says all the animals were created in the same week as humans.
Sheep, for example, according to a study by an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin, and zooarchaeologists from Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) were first domesticated over 11,000 years ago. An analysis of their genome also reflects patterns of migration in the human population, with whom sheep have been intertwined for over 11,000 years.
