Definition of Human Domestication
When the topic of human domestication rises, even staid scholars can riot. Human domestication, as I define it, involves only genetic changes, not behavioral
ones.
In scientific usage, 'domestication' has come to mean the process by which
humans transformed wild animals and plants into more useful products through
control of their breeding. Certain physical and behavioral changes have
been identified as criteria of domestication including "morphological
changes affecting the skeletons of early Middle Eastern domesticates (e.g.,
reduction in size and skeletal robusticity, cranio-facial shortening, and
declining tooth size)," writes anthropologist
Helen Leach of the University of Otago in New Zealand in her article,
Human Domestication Reconsidered. "These changes also occur in some human populations starting in the Late
Pleistocene."
"Unconscious selection pressures are increasingly invoked in explanations of
both sets of data," Leach says.
Juliet Clutton-Brock of the The Natural History Museum, London, suggests the
term "co-domestication."
The Late Pleistocene epoch is defined as from about 126,000 to 10,000
years ago. Glaciers dominated the period, human species other than modern
human died out. Humanity spread to every continent, except for Antarctica,
during the Late Pleistocene.
Although animal domestication may, indeed, involve inheritable behavior changes
(for example, a dog's ability to herd animals) this article does not consider
human inheritable behavior changes. Such changes are too
difficult to detect in humans, especially over 10,000 years ago. I suspect
humans did change genetically to tolerate dogs about then but can find no
strong supporting evidence.
So, 'human domestication', in this article means only morphological changes affecting skeletons (reduction in size and skeletal robusticity, cranio-facial shortening,
and declining tooth size).
Further Reading
Helen M. Leach. (2003) Human Domestication Reconsidered.
Current Anthropology 44:3, 349-368
Online publication date: 1-Jun-2003.
April Holladay lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her column,
WonderQuest, appears every second Monday of the month on WonderQuest.com. To
read April's past columns, please visit her
website . If you have a question for
April, visit this
information page . (Answered May 10, 2010)
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