Domestication
Domestication is a multi-generational mutualistic relationship between humans and other organisms, in which humans took over control and care to obtain a steady supply of resources including food. The process was gradual and geographically diffuse, based on trial and error.
The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, as a commensal, at least 15,000 years ago. Other animals including goat, sheep, and cow were domesticated starting around 11,000 years ago. Among birds, the chicken was domesticated in East Asia, seemingly for cockfighting, some 7,000 years ago. The horse came under domestication around 5,500 years ago in central Asia as a working animal. Among invertebrates, the silkworm and the western honey bee were domesticated over 5,000 years ago for silk and honey, respectively.
The domestication of plants began around 13,000–11,000 years ago with cereals such as wheat and barley in the Middle East, alongside crops such as lentil, pea, chickpea, and flax. Rice was first cultivated in China some 13,500 to 8,200 years ago. Beginning around 10,000 years ago, Indigenous peoples in the Americas began to cultivate peanuts, squash, maize, potatoes, cotton, and cassava. In Africa, crops such as sorghum were domesticated. Agriculture developed in some 13 centres around the world, domesticating different crops and animals.
Domestication affected genes for behavior in animals, making them less aggressive. In plants, domestication affected genes for morphology, such as increasing seed size and stopping the shattering of seed-heads such as in wheat. Such changes both make domesticated organisms easier to handle, and reduce their ability to survive in the wild.
Definitions[edit]
Domestication (not to be confused with the taming of an individual animal[3][4][5]), is from the Latin domesticus, 'belonging to the house'.[6] The term remained loosely defined until the 21st century, when the American archaeologist Melinda A. Zeder defined it as a long-term relationship in which humans take over control and care of another organism to gain a predictable supply of a resource, resulting in mutual benefits. She noted further that it is not synonymous with agriculture, since agriculture depends on domesticated organisms, but does not automatically result from domestication.[7][8][9]
Domestication syndrome is the suite of phenotypic traits which arose during the initial domestication process, and which distinguish crops from their wild ancestors.[10][11] It can also mean a set of differences now observed in domesticated animals, not necessarily reflecting the initial domestication process. The changes include increased docility and tameness, coat coloration, reductions in tooth size, craniofacial morphology, ear and tail form (e.g., floppy ears), estrus cycles, levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone and neurotransmitters, prolongations in juvenile behavior, and reductions in brain size and of particular brain regions.[12]
Wild wheat ears shatter when ripe, but domesticated wheat has to be threshed and winnowed (as shown) to release and separate the grain. Photograph by Harold Weston, Iran, 1920s
Effects[edit]
On domestic animals[edit]
Selection of animals for visible traits may have undesired consequences for the genetics of domestic animals.[88] A side effect of domestication has been zoonotic diseases. For example, cattle have given humanity various viral poxes, measles, and tuberculosis; pigs and ducks have contributed influenza; and horses have brought the rhinoviruses. Many parasites, too, have their origins in domestic animals.[89] Alongside these, the advent of domestication resulted in denser human populations which provided ripe conditions for pathogens to reproduce, mutate, spread, and eventually find a new host in humans.[90]
On society[edit]
Scholars have expressed widely differing viewpoints on domestication's effects on society. Anarcho-primitivism critiques domestication as destroying the supposed primitive state of harmony with nature in hunter-gatherer societies, and replacing it, possibly violently or by enslavement, with a social hierarchy as property and power emerged.[91] The dialectal naturalist Murray Bookchin has argued that domestication of animals in turn meant the domestication of humanity, both parties being unavoidably altered by their relationship with each other.[92] The sociologist David Nibert asserts that the domestication of animals involved violence against animals and damage to the environment. This in turn, he argues, corrupted human ethics, and paved the way for "conquest, extermination, displacement, repression, coerced and enslaved servitude, gender subordination and sexual exploitation, and hunger."[93]