[colatkinson]

Ehh it's getting into pedantic territory as to what counts as directed vs undirected, but people figured out pretty quick that if you have an animal with a desirable trait you can breed it with others to maybe get offspring that also have that trait.

As an illustrative example, consider the fancy pigeon (see [0] for some pics). One of Darwin's original areas of study was to prove that these birds, many of which have cool-looking but incredibly maladaptive traits, were actually the same species as the pigeons you'd see on a London street. Prior to that, the scientific consensus was that these were fully distinct species -- i.e. the artificial selection happened so long ago that it was lost to time. Given some breeds have trouble even eating (e.g. look at the beak on this guy [1]), I think it's a pretty safe assumption that this breeding did not happen without careful human intervention.

That's not to say that the kind/degree of artificial selection we see in industrial agriculture isn't worlds away from older forms. Once you've got the basics of evolution and the scale of capitalist production, you're starting down the road to the current world of 100 pound antibiotic-riddled chickens in rows of 10000 cages. But humans have been selectively breeding animals for food, utility, or just because we kinda felt like it since time immemorial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_pigeon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Frill