When I became interested in the history of sheep 25 years ago, the paper by Hilzheimer (1936) was my chief source of inspiration, and in fact there had been few advances on his conclusions. Since then, however, there have been major advances, and the present account attempts to assess the extent to which these have added to the knowledge so ably summarized by Hilzheimer.

His conclusions were based mainly on ancient representations (an approach which reached its peak with the work of Zeuner, 1963) and the comparison of bone remains with those of a few primitive breeds that happened to be within the experience of the investigator.