Domestication

ScumLord

Many animals have gone through the process of domestication, dogs being the most successful. The process changes the animal's behaviour and its physical appearance.

It's those physical changes that I'm wondering about. When Russian scientists domesticated a wild fox by breeding the most tame ones together the foxes changed colour, developed a curly tail, took on characteristics like you'd find in dogs.

Could the same process have lead to human physical differences like white skin, blue eyes, blond hair? I know there some problems with that thought in that these characteristics don't necessarily come from what we think of as the most civilized part of the world in prehistoric times. The Nordic countries may not have been as civilized as the people from the indus valley, but as far as I know that's where these adaptations come from. Although I've also heard of red hair coming from the middle east and we know those people spread throughout Europe.

White skin has an advantage for people that live in countries with little sun but our body wouldn't have made that conscious change for the better, something must have happened and it succeeded because it was useful. Could domestication have been that process? A problem of course would be the behaviour, white people obviously didn't get any nicer, our cities weren't any bigger than those from the middle east, so we didn't get tameness.

Black Swan

Domestication (Latin domesticus: of the home) has been defined as the cultivating or taming of a population of organisms through goal-directed artificial selection in order to accentuate desirable traits. The American Museum of Natural History gives a rough domestication timeline for dogs (15,000 years ago), sheep (10,000), pigs (8,000), cattle (8,000), horses (6,000), and llamas (4,500). It should be noted that many plants have also been domesticated.

The theory of human self-domestication (Arnold Gehlen, 1944), where modern homo sapiens may have undergone cultivated anatomical trait changes akin to animal domestication over thousands of years has been a matter of controversial debate in the sciences and philosophy, especially if human eugenics were specifically addressed.

Reference: Brune, M (2007), On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, Vol 2: 21 (online).

ScumLord

Black Swan wrote: »

Domestication (Latin domesticus: of the home) has been defined as the cultivating or taming of a population of organisms through goal-directed artificial selection in order to accentuate desirable traits. The American Museum of Natural History gives a rough domestication timeline for dogs (15,000 years ago),

Dogs wouldn't have been domesticated then, and would be closer to what I'm describing happened to humans. We didn't domesticate dogs, it seems more likely they domesticated themselves for access to our food. A side effect of becoming tame was that they picked up new physical features like hair colour, floppy ears, curly tail. It's a bit like they don't mature into aggressive adults, but stay submissive pups.

Black Swan

ScumLord wrote: »

We didn't domesticate dogs, it seems more likely they domesticated themselves for access to our food. A side effect of becoming tame was that they picked up new physical features like hair colour, floppy ears, curly tail. It's a bit like they don't mature into aggressive adults, but stay submissive pups.

If this theory continues to receive support, self-domestication apparently has occurred in other species besides dogs. Bonobos (Pan paniscus) exhibit physical and behavioural changes often attributed to domestication in an environment where artificial human goal-directed domestication practices did not occur, but were in close proximity to human habitation and became self-domesticated as a consequence.

Reference: Hare, B, Wobber, V, and Wrangham, R (2012), The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due to selection against aggression. Animal Behavior 83(3), pp 573-585.

mzungu

A joint study between Trinity and Oxford brings an interesting development to this area. The study offers the hypothesis that two separate wolf populations in east and west Eurasia could have been domesticated independently prior to settled agriculture. Eastern dogs migrated west alongside humans between 6400 and 14000 years ago to Western Europe thus partially replacing the indigenous population. Essentially meaning modern dogs can trace their ancestry to Asia.

Link: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6290/1228.full

The caveat:

Nevertheless, given the complexity of the evolutionary history of dogs and uncertainties related to mutation rates, generation times, and the incomplete nature of the archaeological record, our scenario remains hypothetical. Genome sequences derived from ancient Eurasian dogs and wolves, combined with detailed morphological and contextual studies of the archaeological remains, will provide the necessary means to assess whether dog domestication occurred more than once.

Frantz, L. A. F. et al. (2016) Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs. Science. Vol. 352, Issue 6290, pp. 1228-1231