Histories of Animal Geographies

Animals have long had a presence in geography as a discipline. In the modern period, two closely related approaches characterized a distinct study of animals in geography. The first became known as zoogeography and sought to map evolutionary distributions of animals and was closely allied to what was to become a more physical geographical approach, allied with zoology and the (then) emerging disciplines of ecology and biogeography. The other related approach focused more on animal domestication as part of studies of the Neolithic agricultural revolution and of distributions and diffusions of domesticated animals. The latter was referred to as cultural geography but overlapped with cultural ecology (and human ecology in some studies) and became closely associated with archaeology and historical anthropology.