[b112]

We've been breeders for at least 10s of thousands of years, not just with dogs, but endless work animals, livestock, plants.

Empirically one can go a long way, into understanding that inbreeding is bad, that diversity is good. I wouldn't be surprised to see Greek, or Sumerian texts on breeding...

[barry-cotter]

Amazingly this isn’t true. You would think selective would have been invented by the Greeks or Romans, someone, but the first evidence of long run sustained breeding programmes for a desired trait using careful record keeping was during the British Agricultural Revolution of the 1700s. For more detail read the link https://gwern.net/review/bakewell