May 06, 2003
Human Domestication Reconsidered
Helen Leach is proposing that the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene (archaeologically Neolithic) humans underwent changes similar to those of animals that underwent the domestication process. So, she argues that if we apply terminology consistently, we must also entertain the possibility that humans themselves are a domesticated species.
Human Domestication Reconsidered
by Helen M. Leach
CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003, pp. 349-368
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, cranio-facial 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 long-established 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.
Posted by Dienekes at May 6, 2003 01:35 PM | PermaLinkinteresting. i agree with notion of mankinds domestication of other sectors of mankind rathery than "slavery" may hold the key to availabity of labour for great works. Laterally to this is that distributions of later populations differing in interpretation by mitochondial and nuclear traits may result from common "use" of one sector by males of other sectors as breeding sources, ie lack of symetry between male and female lines diversification etc. Has anybody worked or modelleled along these lines of thought? Colin Leakey-
Posted by: colin leakey at August 7, 2003 09:14 AM