Questioning Calories, or Why Did People Initiate Animal Domestication?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We can define animal domestication as a type of evolutionary process, one initiated when humans increased their control over the reproduction, diet, and mobility of certain animal populations, thereby unintentionally selecting for novel traits in these populations. Domestication occurred in various social contexts, but generally within the Holocene—a period marked by sustained global human population growth and increased plant resource richness in many biomes. Most theories explaining why humans pursued new relationships with animal species, which in many cases set the evolutionary gears in motion for domestication, focus on subsistence stress and/or opportunities arising from population growth. However, there are reasons to question these subsistence-centric theories. First, livestock production is typically less efficient for calorie procurement compared to horticulture, fishing, or gathering nuts. Second, it is not always clear that human population pressure during the Neolithic was significantly above carrying capacity to the point where hunted wild animal populations were under stress. In this paper, while not denying the importance of animal products for dietary reason and using the Near East as a case study, I revisit the idea that the domestication of livestock was primarily driven by people seeking new forms of value (or wealth) in changing social contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unfinished Business and Untold Stories: Digging into the Complexity of ‘Animal Domestication’   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51711