Criollo goats of the Americas: an Iberian herd left to five centuries of local selection

The goats the Spanish landed in the sixteenth century were never bred back to a standard, and the populations that came out the other end are now the animal of the driest, poorest ground in Latin America. Microsatellite work across 43 goat populations places the Ecuadorian criollo with the Iberian and Creole cluster with no detectable crossing to modern commercial breeds; genome-wide work in Peru finds low inbreeding, regional structure — and effective population sizes that are falling.