Insights from Commensal Pathways into Domestication Origins

Summary

Research on the origins of animal domestication has relied heavily on the use of morphometric characteristics of skeletal remains as diagnostic markers for important shape and size changes, which supposedly signaled the beginnings of domestication processes. However, the utility of this approach for pinpointing the timing and geographic and cultural context of initial domestication has been recently questioned. This approach has been undermined by empirical findings from geometric morphometric studies of phenotypic variation in key diagnostic traits in dogs and pigs, DNA research, and theoretical thinking from the perspective of niche construction and the extended synthesis of evolution. These developments call for rethinking of current approaches to documenting early domestication pathways, and suggest a way forward to addressing pressing issues in the how and why human societies began to domesticate animals. A step in this direction is provided by recent work on the house mouse and the context of its initial commensal bond with pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers in the southern Levant. This work offers important insights into early human-animal interactions, which did not yet involve the kind of conscious directed human intervention which was likely to have furnished the triggering mechanism for later changes in skeletal morphometry of animal domesticates.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21383