The Evolution of Animal Domestication

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2020

Journal of Zoology, 2006

Domesticated animals are universally familiar. How, when, where and why they became domesticated is less well understood. The genetic revolution of the past few decades has facilitated novel insights into a field that previously was principally the domain of archaeozoologists. Although some of the conclusions drawn from genetic data have proved to be contentious, many studies have significantly altered or refined our understanding of past human animal relationships. This review seeks not only to discuss the wider concerns and ramifications of genetic approaches to the study of animal domestication but also to provide a broader theoretical framework for understanding the process itself. More specifically, we discuss issues related to the terminology associated with domestication, the possibility of domestication genes, and the promise and problems of genetics to answer the fundamental questions associated with domestication.

2012

Jack Harlan was a polymath. His life-long study of crop evolution combined plant sciences, archaeology, systematics, genetics, and conservation, leaving a legacy of five decades of influential publications that explored all aspects of crop plantstheir origins, their dispersal, and their continued and future role in supporting the Earth's burgeoning populations. To Harlan, agriculture was not an invention or the product of a single big idea. Instead, he saw agricultural origins in terms of a long co-evolutionary process involving humans and plants that grew out of "many independent tentatives in many locations that fused over time to produce effective food production systems" (Harlan 1995). Harlan's remarkable body of published work contains only one short encyclopedia entry on the subject of animal domestication (Harlan 1994). He was, in fact, somewhat dismissive of the contribution of animal domesticates to humankind's food supply stating that "(a)nimals are not essential, plants supply over 90% of the food consumed by humans" . Jack Harlan would likely agree, however, that understanding livestock evolution requires the same breadth of focus that he brought to the study of crop evolution. Here I follow Harlan's example in a consideration of domestic animals, bringing together information from animal sciences, genetics, and archaeology to explore the multiple pathways leading to animal domestication and the implications of these pathways for current and future relationships between humans and their animal partners.

PNAS

It is difficult to overstate the cultural and biological impacts that the domestication of plants and animals has had on our species. Fundamental questions regarding where, when, and how many times domestication took place have been of primary interest within a wide range of academic disciplines. Within the last two decades, the advent of new archaeological and genetic techniques has revolutionized our understanding of the pattern and process of domestication and agricultural origins that led to our modern way of life. In the spring of 2011, 25 scholars with a central interest in domestication representing the fields of genetics, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and archaeology met at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center to discuss recent domestication research progress and identify challenges for the future. In this introduction to the resulting Special Feature, we present the state of the art in the field by discussing what is known about the spatial and temporal patterns of domestication, and controversies surrounding the speed, intentionality, and evolutionary aspects of the domestication process. We then highlight three key challenges for future research. We conclude by arguing that although recent progress has been impressive, the next decade will yield even more substantial insights not only into how domestication took place, but also when and where it did, and where and why it did not."

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009

Artificial selection is the selection of advantageous natural variation for human ends and is the mechanism by which most domestic species evolved. Most domesticates have their origin in one of a few historic centers of domestication as farm animals. Two notable exceptions are cats and dogs. Wolf domestication was initiated late in the Mesolithic when humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Those wolves less afraid of humans scavenged nomadic hunting camps and over time developed utility, initially as guards warning of approaching animals or other nomadic bands and soon thereafter as hunters, an attribute tuned by artificial selection. The first domestic cats had limited utility and initiated their domestication among the earliest agricultural Neolithic settlements in the Near East. Wildcat domestication occurred through a self-selective process in which behavioral reproductive isolation evolved as a correlated character of assortative mating coupled to habitat choice for urban environments. Eurasian wildcats initiated domestication and their evolution to companion animals was initially a process of natural, rather than artificial, selection over time driven during their sympatry with forbear wildcats.

Agronomy, 2021

Comptes Rendus Biologies, 2011

Animal Frontiers, 2021

Domestic animals have played an important role in shaping human Evolution and History. After millennia of constructing niches based on hunting, gathering, and foraging, a range of communities in diverse parts of the world embarked on trajectories of food production which in some instances led to the emergence of complex societies, urbanism, and empires, sowing the seeds for our current globalization. Thanks to intensive zooarcheology and genomics research, it is now common knowledge that, apart from dog domestication within hunter-gatherers societies around 23,000 years Before Present (BP) terminus post quem (Perri et al., 2021), the domestication of globally important livestock animals occurred within sedentary communities engaged in early agriculture in three independent cradles. The oldest of these is located in Southwest Asia where cereals (wheat, barley), legumes (pulse, peas, lentils), and fruits (figs) were domesticated between 12,000 and 10,000 BP, followed by sheep, goat, pigs, and cattle between 10,500 and 10,000 BP (Colledge et al., 2013). The second cradle is located in China where domesticated millets and rice were cultivated in the Yellow and Yangtze River valleys by 10,000 BP. This was followed relatively rapidly by pig domestication in the Yellow River valley (Jing and Flad, 2002; Cucchi et al., 2016). The last major center of ungulate domestication is located in the Andes, where agriculture based on imported maize and locally domesticated potato, beans, and squashes emerged between 9000 and 8000 BP along with South American camelids, llamas and alpacas, later followed by Barba's duck and the guinea pig around 4000 BP (Pearsall, 2008; Hardigan et al., 2017). North America, also contributed to global animal domestication with the turkey by 2000 BP (Speller et al., 2010). In the Old World, a later series of animal domestications focused on the use of animal labor, with the domestic forms of donkey, horse, and camel emerging between 5000 and 2000 BP (Clutton-Brock, 2014). These animals revolutionized human

The domestication of plants and animals is a key transition in human history, and its profound and continuing impacts are the focus of a broad range of transdisciplinary research spanning the physical, biological, and social sciences. Three central aspects of domestication that cut across and unify this diverse array of research perspectives are addressed here. Domestication is defined as a distinctive coevolutionary, mutualistic relationship between domesticator and domesticate and distinguished from related but ultimately different processes of resource management and agri- culture. The relative utility of genetic, phenotypic, plastic, and contextual markers of evolving domesticatory relationships is discussed. Causal factors are considered, and two leading explan- atory frameworks for initial domestication of plants and animals, one grounded in optimal foraging theory and the other in niche- construction theory, are compared.

Nature Reviews Genetics, 2020

Animal domestication was one of the most important transitions in human history 1,2 , beginning with the long-term association between hunter-gatherers and wolves more than 15,000 years ago 3. Following the emergence of mixed-crop farming societies 1,2 , between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago (roughly the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age) numerous other species became incorporated within human societies, including, but not limited to, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, chickens and horses. Since their domestication, animals have occupied a wide range of roles, from simply being tolerated, to being venerated within ritual practices, to providing humans with other benefits, including food, clothing, material for construction, transportation, herding and hunting. The diversification of phenotypes, evident in multiple domesticated taxa, has also provided generations of biologists with a key model with which to study evolution 4,5. The process by which humans voluntarily or involuntarily transformed animals into the diverse resources they now represent has traditionally been documented through two complementary approaches. The first approach, based on the archaeological record, documents morpho-anatomical changes and cultural innovations through space and time 6,7. Osteological changes 8 , age of death and sex ratio profiles 9 , isotopic signatures 10 and traces of material culture (for example, harnesses 11 and corrals 12) represent some of the diverse markers for the shift in the relationship between humans and animals, which we now refer to as indicators of domestication. However, the archaeological record is fragmentary, and many traits (such as colouration, docility and fecundity) that probably diverged in domestic