A youngish (2 or 3 years?) male kri-kri in the village of Samaria. The animals, especially the males are normally very shy but in the gorge of Samaria they get used to seeing a lot of people and come down to the village to scavenge for food. It is still very unusual to see an adult male so closely.
The kri-kri is not thought to be indigenous to Crete, but was imported during the time of the Minoan civilization. Nevertheless, it is found nowhere else and the form is therefore endemic to Crete. Recent DNA analyses demonstrated that the kri-kri is not, as previously thought, a distinct subspecies of the wild goat but a feral domestic goat derived from the first stocks of domesticated goats in the Levant and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean around 8000-7500 BC.
