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Ganj-e Dareh is a Neolithic settlement in Iranian Kurdistan, it is located in the east of Kermanshah. The site dates back to ca. 10,000 years ago and yielded the earliest evidence for goat domestication in the world. It was excavated by Canadian archaeologist, Philip Smith during 1960’s and 1970’s.

 Ganj Dareh is an Early Neolithic archaeological site in the Kermanshah district of southwestern Iran. The site was occupied about 8400-7000 BC. Ganj Dareh is a small mound, representing an early highland village with evidence for domestication of the goat, and some of the earliest ceramics in the Near East as well. Artifacts from the site include clay figurines of humans and animals; Ganj Dareh is considered among the earliest permanent settlements in the Near East.

Ganj Dareh is an Early Neolithic archaeological site in the Kermanshah district of southwestern Iran. The site was occupied about 8400-7000 BC. Ganj Dareh is a small mound, representing an early highland village with evidence for domestication of the goat, and some of the earliest ceramics in the Near East as well. Artifacts from the site include clay figurines of humans and animals; Ganj Dareh is considered among the earliest permanent settlements in the Near East.

Along the craggy limestone ridges of the Zagros Mountains that run through western Iran and northeastern Iraq, the relationship between humans and goats dramatically changed around 10,000 years ago.  New research by Dr. Melinda Zeder, Curator of Old World Archaeology & Zooarchaeology at the National Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Brian Hesse of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shows that goats, hunted in the region since the time of Neanderthals, were now being bred and herded instead.  Their findings on this historic shift, which forever changed both the societies of human herders and the ecology of regions where goats and other livestock animals lived, were reported in the March 24, 2000 issue of Science.