Most domesticated species naturally live in a group like a pack (dogs) or a herd (horses, cattle, sheep, goats), so that when domesticated, a human takes over as ‘leader of the pack’ – this is not a significant change from their wild behavior.
But this doesn’t apply to cats.
There’s been a project running in Russia to domesticate wild foxes by selective breeding. They seem to have basically succeeded in just 50 years.
So it’s probably not as hard is it looks, for animals with a suitable temperament (or the genetic capacity to acquire it) in the first place.
That could be more than 50 generations of red foxes:
It’s a very intensive breeding process and it’s unlikely primitive people attempted it unless they had a good idea that the end result would be a useful animal. I think the concept of selective breeding and success at it would have come from readily tamable animals. The process would have started before metal cages and heavy fencing was available so natural barriers or more controllable animals would have been the first to be intentionally domesticated. Possibly dogs led the way, some isolated sub-species of wolf that first developed a symbiotic relationship with humans. An animal would have to be controlled somehow and no danger to humans, and need to be recognized as more useful to keep for breeding than as food or raw materials before intentional domestication began, though with dogs perhaps uncontrolled breeding still led to further domestication.
As for cats, it’s well known that they domesticated us.
Guns, Germs, & Steel is a great book. But skip the TV show. Unwatchably bad.
There is an article in this month’s Scientific American on the domestication of dogs. Although the case is not airtight (by far) they feel basically that wolves domesticated themselves as suggested upthread. They also mention the Russian fox experiment. It seems that a lot of domestication consists of neoteny (persistence of childhood traits). And yes cats certainly domesticated us.
In one of Jane Jacobs’s books, she speculates on the domestication of herd animals. For her, everything revolved around cities, so this has to be taken with a certain caution. Still it is interesting. She pictures trading posts as precursors of cities. A hunter might trade meat for vegetables from a gatherer. Dead meat doesn’t keep very well, so the hunter might try to capture live animals and the traders would have built pens to keep them in. Some of the animals would breed and the trader would see his stock increase. Of course, he had to keep them fed, but maybe if the pen was big enough they could keep themselves fed. Over the years, he might identify the more docile animals and deliberately try to breed them thus beginning the road to full domestication. Once it was seen for one animal, they might then have tried to do it consciously for another. I cannot imagine the accidental domestication happening for an aurochs, but perhaps some variety of sheep.
Jacobs similarly imagined farming as developing from grain accidentally dropped at a trading post, but that is a whole nother tale.
This is a plausible explanation for the domestication of livestock. The italicized part is important, I think livestock domestication may have followed agricultural development of feed for the animals. Possibly the domestication of dogs also, hunting dogs who would drive prey toward the hunters would be very valuable and well kept. Those same dogs could easily have been used as herders.
This may not be correct. Consider the early inhabitants of Peru-they had a fish and cotton based economy with no rice or wheat. And of course the Mayan civilizations did just fine without either grain. For a non-technical explanation see “1491” by Charles Mann. A very thought provoking book.
That seems unlikely. If a herd of animals were living close to humans then you would expect the animals that were unafraid of humans to be the first ones hunted and eaten, thereby removing those human-tolerant genes from the herd. Contact between a wild herd and a human tribe of hunters would normally result in the herd becoming more afraid of humans as time went on. And the megafauna extinction in places like America and Australia supports this.
So the only way a species of herd animals would be bred to tolerate human contact is if the humans were controlling their breeding. It appears possession of herd animals has to proceed domestication.
ETA: nm, I’ll reword the whole post later
Even today the leopard cat (Felis bengalensis) which can be bred with the Domestic cat, will live sometimes in a village, eating the rodents and in harmony with the humans.
Other examples are the pigeons and squirrels that live in modern cities. Humans aren’t hunting them but we are dropping food all over the place. So wild pigeons and squirrels that lose their fear of humans do better than the pigeons and squirrels that avoid human contact.
Can humans approach juvenile leopard cats, or will even the young cats scurry away every time?
I dunno, they do say that adults “rarely allow humans to touch or handle them”. So that seems to indicate that adults sometimes allow it and that kittens may do so more often. But even those raised in captivity from birth (they are used to breed with domestic cats to produce Bengal cats) are 'wild" and skittish, but rarely fierce.
I’m not suggesting that it happened that way in history, but it does show that canids have an “aptitude” for it, if you like, they are intrinsically domesticable.
And it may not be just us: Monkeys’ cosy alliance with wolves looks like domestication.
That is really cool. But who is domesticating who? The wolves are getting food, what do the monkeys get? Protection?
This doesn’t distinguish them from feral felis catus in any way whatsoever. In fact, the same could be said of many of the barn cats when I was a kid on the farm.
I think that might have played a big role. Young animals are cute and cuddly, so maybe hunters find and kill Mommy and Daddy but can’t bring themselves to kill Babby too, or to leave them to die either so they take them home with them instead. Happens in nature with wild animals too, once in a while (I remember one nature program about a monkey of some description rescuing a tiger cub)
Not getting eaten 
Robert163 was probably overstating for simplification. In his book, Diamond takes pains to point out the cases of plant and animal domestication occurred in the Americas. It’s not that indigenous Americans did not or could not domesticate, but that they had poor “raw materials” and strong “headwinds” (that is, fairly few small domesticable animals, more difficult plants, and a north-south continental axis which did not favor spread of successful cultivars). Perhaps the Mayans “did just fine” without rice/wheat/pulses; Jared Diamond argues that they may have done much better with them (and cows/sheep/horses).
That’s along the lines of what I was thinking. Little Nemo pointed out the problem that hunting the adults who were raised by humans and less afraid of them could get depopulated before you had anything going. But something like that might give them the idea to try out once they had a means of controlling the adults.
Also, in general, I don’t know where the dairy animals fit into this. Were wild sheep tame enough to milk? Would an aurochs cow stand still for that?
So far. Maybe the wolves have a plan.
It sounds more like the wolves domesticating the monkeys. Maybe they’ll end up herding them toward the best supply of rodents.
I could be mistaken (since it’s been a while since I’ve read the book), but I don’t recall it claiming the lack of wheat and rice as a disadvantage for the Native American civilizations. Maize and amaranth were just about as good and the potato probably better. What the Americas lacked was a large draft animal. But they did as well as they could with this handicap.
To put some recent science into this discussion, there was a report that the domestication of dogs was as long ago as 27,000 to 40,000 years ago. link