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Sometime in the last 200,000 years, humans began weeding out people with an overdose of reactive aggression, Wrangham suggests. Increasingly complex social skills would have allowed early humans to gang up against bullies, he proposes, pointing out that hunter-gatherers today have been known to do the same. Those who got along, got ahead.
Once animals have been selected for tameness, other traits tend to follow , including reshaping of the head and face. Humans even look domesticated: Compared with Neandertals’ , our faces are shorter with smaller brow ridges, and males’ faces are more similar to those of females.
Selecting for less-aggressive humans could have also helped us flourish as a social species, says Antonio Benítez-Burraco, who studies language evolution at the University of Huelva in Spain. The earliest Homo sapiens were becoming capable of complex thought, he proposes, but not yet language. “We were modern in the sense of having modern brains, but we were not modern in behavior.”
Once humans began to self-domesticate, though, changes to neural crest cells could have nudged us toward a highly communicative species. Something similar happens in songbirds: Domesticated birds have more complex songs than their wild counterparts. What’s more, self-domestication may be more common than once thought . Bonobos, Wrangham notes, live in peaceful groups compared with closely related, but more violent, chimpanzees. If humans took steps to domesticate themselves, perhaps they weren’t the only ones.
This story appears in the July 8, 2017, issue of Science News as a sidebar with the headline, “Domesticating us.”
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A version of this article appears in the July 8, 2017 issue of Science News.
Citations
A.S. Wilkins et al. The “domestication syndrome” in mammals: A unified explanation based on neural crest cell behavior and genetics . Genetics . Vol. 197, 2014, p. 795. doi: 10.1534/genetics.114.165423.
A. Benítez-Burraco et al. Schizophrenia and human self-domestication: an evolutionary linguistics approach . Brain, Behavior and Evolution . Vol. 89, May 3, 2017, p. 162. doi: 10.1159/000468506.
C. Theofanopoulou et al. Comparative Genomic Evidence for Self-Domestication in Homo sapiens . Published online at BioRxiv.org. doi: 10.1101/125799.
R. L. Cieri et al. Craniofacial Feminization, Social Tolerance, and the Origins of Behavioral Modernity . Current Anthropology. Vol. 55, August 2014, p. 419. doi: 10.1086/677209.
B. Hare et al. The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due to selection against aggression . Animal Behaviour . Vol. 83, 2012, p. 573. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.12.007.
Trut, L., I. Oskina, and A. Kharlamova. Animal evolution during domestication: the domesticated fox as a model . Bioessays. Vol. 31, 2009, 349–360.
Erika Engelhaupt is a freelance science writer and editor based in Knoxville, Tenn.
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