Reconsidering domestication from a process archaeology perspective

Bogaard, Amy; Allaby, Robin G.; Arbuckle, Benjamin S.; Bendrey, Robin; Crowley, Sarah L.; Cucchi, Thomas; Denham, Tim; Frantz, Laurent; Fuller, Dorian Q.; Gilbert, M. Thomas P.; Karlsson, Elinor K.; Manin, Aurélie; Marshall, Fiona; Mueller, Natalie G.; Peters, Joris; Stépanoff, Charles; Weide, Alexander; Larson, Greger

doi:10.1080/00438243.2021.1954990

Cited by 50 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…Arguably, social relations and genetic selection are part of the same domestication process. The farming communities which evolved in this process should therefore be understood as a collective of human and non-human organisms that live in and from mutually beneficial collaborations [56]. From this follows that we must also understand its emergence as the evolution of a collective, shaped by ecological, social, economic, and genetic relationships that created the conditions under which all involved partners changed and continue to change.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contextualising quantitative data for phenotypic domestication traits with these changing socio-economic environments will help better understand the nature of selection during the slow and protracted domestication process, and factors that established the conditions for selection. At the same time, this will help to better frame domestication as a co-evolutionary process, involving non-human and human partners which evolve together in multi-species collectives but not independently from each other [56].…”

Section: Households In the Pre-pottery Neolithicmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Towards a Socio-Economic Model for Southwest Asian Cereal Domestication

Weide

2021

Agronomy

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Mechanisms of selection for domestication traits in cereals and other annual plants are commonly explained from agro-technological and genetic perspectives. Since archaeobotanical data showed that domestication processes were slow and protracted, research focused on genetic constraints and hypothetical ‘non-selective’ management regimes to explain the low selection rates. I argue that these factors only partially explain the observed patterns and develop a model that contextualises the archaeobotanical data in their socio-economic settings. I propose that developments towards individual storage by small household units and the gradual increase in storage capacities with the development of extended households represent key factors for establishing the conditions for selection, as these practices isolated individually managed and stored cereal subpopulations and gradually reduced the need to replenish grain stocks with grains from unmanaged populations. This genetic isolation resulted in stronger and more persistent selection rates and facilitated the genetic fixation of domestication traits on a population level. Moreover, individual storage facilities within buildings reflect gradual developments towards households as the social units that mobilised agricultural labour, which negotiated new sharing principles over cultivated resources and drove the intensification of cultivation practices. In this sense, selection rates and the slow domestication process can be understood as a function of limited food sharing networks and increased labour-inputs into early arable environments—socio-economic processes that also unfolded gradually over a protracted period of time.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Households In the Pre-pottery Neolithicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Socio-Economic Model for Southwest Asian Cereal Domestication

Weide

2021

Agronomy

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“…Thus, it has been estimated that following deliberate cultivation of wild wheat, full morphological domestication, i.e., spikelet non-shattering, could have evolved within 20-200 years [3]. However, the current archaeobotanical consensus view is that this process actually took millennia [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]; but see [18][19][20]. Over this time scale, various other traits related to seasonality have been selected for, affecting different stages of the plant life cycle (Figure 1).…”

Section: Cerealsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Time to Sow, a Time to Reap: Modifications to Biological and Economic Rhythms in Southwest Asian Plant and Animal Domestication

et al. 2022

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This paper reviews changes to lifecycle temporality in Southwest Asian plant and animal domestication, exploring their relationship to long-term processes associated with ancient and contemporary globalization. We survey changes under domestication to the timing of seed dispersal, germination, vegetative growth, flowering and maturation in wheat and barley and to birth, reproduction, lactation, wool production and death in sheep, goats and cattle. Changes in biological temporality among domesticates are ultimately related to globally increasing production intensity, geographic diffusion, and agricultural diversity associated with cultivar/breed evolution. Recently, however, increasing crop production intensity and geographic diffusion are accompanied by declining agricultural diversity worldwide. Similar processes are apparent in contemporary economic and cultural globalization, suggesting that long-term agricultural developments might be viewed as a subset of globalization. Moreover, the origin of certain features of contemporary globalization may be traced back to the beginnings of plant and animal domestication. Thus, while biologists since Darwin considered domestication as a model for the study of evolution, we suggest that domestication may also offer a model for the study of globalization.

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“…Archaeology has also long made arguments against the centrality of human intent in domestication (Zeuner, 1963; Rindos, 1984; O’Connor, 1997; Zeder, 2012; Stépanoff and Vigne, 2018; Bogaard et al, 2021). In a well-known example, Zeder (2012) proposed three potential scenarios through which animals became domestic, including one termed the commensal pathway.…”

Section: Thinking Through Domestication Definitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domestication is not an ancient moment of selection for prosociality: Insights from dogs and modern humans

Losey

2021

Journal of Social Archaeology

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Domestication is often portrayed as a long-past event, at times even in archaeological literature. The term domestication is also now applied to other processes, including human evolution. In such contexts, domestication means selection for friendliness or prosociality and the bodily results of such selective choices. Both such perspectives are misleading. Using dogs and modern humans as entry points, this paper explores why conceiving of domestication as a threshold event consisting of selection for prosociality is both incomplete and inaccurate. Domestication is an ongoing process, not a moment or an achievement. Selection in breeding, including for prosociality, is a part of many domestication histories, but it alone does not sustain this process over multiple generations. Further, much selection in domestication has little to do with human intention. Care, taming, commensalism, material things, and places are critical in carrying domestic relationships forward.

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Reconsidering domestication from a process archaeology perspective

Cited by 50 publications

References 127 publications

Towards a Socio-Economic Model for Southwest Asian Cereal Domestication

Towards a Socio-Economic Model for Southwest Asian Cereal Domestication

A Time to Sow, a Time to Reap: Modifications to Biological and Economic Rhythms in Southwest Asian Plant and Animal Domestication

Domestication is not an ancient moment of selection for prosociality: Insights from dogs and modern humans

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