Human Domestication Reconsidered

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 behavioural changes have been identified as criteria of domestication. They include morphological changes affecting the skeletons of early Middle Eastern domesticates (e.g., reduction in size and skeletal robusticity, craniofacial shortening, and declining tooth size). 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. The longestablished paradigm of human control over domestication through artificial selection has meant that parallelism in these changes is seldom noted and few inclusive explanations have been attempted since the early 1900s. Recently, only symbolic and social domestication has been accepted for Homo sapiens. This article proposes a preliminary case for human biological domestication based on the effects of the built environment, decreased mobility, and changes in diet consistency associated with increasing sedentism.