But, being over 11, 000 years old, they predate the domestication of cereals in the Middle East by a millennium.
Coincidentally, these regions also saw the domestication of cattle and the adoption of milk-drinking by adults around the same time.
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The harness may date back nearly as far as the domestication of the horse, which occurred approximately 6, 000 years ago.
The period leading up to the domestication of cereals was one of erratic climate change, as the last ice age ended.
"Pigeons are one of the organisms that Darwin investigated in great detail, in particular to study variation under domestication, " said Dr Pearn.
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It includes the original domestication sites for maize, pumpkin, avocado and beans.
In both cases, domestication and selective breeding have produced huge numbers of different breeds - each with a distinctive physique, colour and even behaviour.
One confounding issue might be that domestication happened more than once.
Gordon Childe, to describe the transition from hunting-and-gathering the dominant mode of subsistence for the two hundred thousand years before the last ice age to domestication and agriculture.
The benefits of Libya's relative domestication have been manifold.
Childe ascribed the shift to climate change, to conditions that dried up the lush forests and plains: humans and animals were drawn together at the last remaining oases, where proximity led to domestication, sedentism, and agriculture.
More intriguingly, an experiment carried out in 2004 by Brian Hare, then at Harvard and now of Duke University in North Carolina, suggested that natural selection in the context of domestication had boosted dogs' intelligence, too, by allowing them to understand human behaviour in a way that their ancestors, wolves, cannot.
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