Domestication was long imagined as an act: someone captured a wild animal and bred it. The genetic and archaeological evidence describes something slower and less deliberate. Wolves that tolerated proximity to human camps fed better than those that did not, and selection for tolerance ran for generations before anyone can have intended a dog. Similar sequences appear for pigs and cats, both of which plausibly domesticated themselves around settlements before people took control of their breeding. Cattle and horses look more directed, though even there the earliest changes precede any evidence of deliberate selection. The pattern is of animals adapting to a niche humans had created without meaning to. The intention that the older story requires appears late in the sequence, if at all.