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| Japanese serow |
While most goat-like animals today are grazers, subsisting on relatively large quantities of low-quality forage, it's thought that their ancestors were originally browsing animals, defending small patches of high quality food in otherwise inhospitable and craggy terrain. In the west, the most familiar surviving "resource defenders" of this kind are the
chamois of Europe. While the exact evolutionary relationships of chamois aren't entirely clear, they are part of a broad cluster of species that is otherwise crammed with grazing animals, such as "true" goats and sheep.
Not so their counterparts in Asia, which form their own distinct evolutionary line, one that never appears to have given rise to true grazing animals. It is these species, not the chamois, that probably most resemble the ancestral goats from which all others evolved.
