insight
review articles
700
NATURE
|
VOL 418
|
8 AUGUST 2002
|
www.nature.com/nature
P
lant and animal domestication is the most
important development in the past 13,000
years of human history. It interests all of us,
scientists and non-scientists alike, because it
provides most of our food today, it was
prerequisite to the rise of civilization, and it transformed
global demography. Because domestication ultimately
yielded agents of conquest (for example, guns, germs and
steel) but arose in only a few areas of the world, and in
certain of those areas earlier than in others, the peoples
who
through
biogeographic
luck
first
acquired
domesticates acquired enormous advantages over other
peoples and expanded. As a result of those replacements,
about 88% of all humans alive today speak some language
belonging to one or another of a mere seven language
families confined in the early Holocene to two small areas
of Eurasia that happened to become the earliest centres of
domestication — the Fertile Crescent and parts of China.
Through that head start, the inhabitants of those two
areas spread their languages and genes over much of the
rest of the world. Those localized origins of domestication
ultimately explain why this international journal of
science is published in an Indo-European language rather
than in Basque, Swahili, Quechua or Pitjantjatjara.
Much of this review is devoted to domestication itself: its
origins, the biological changes involved, its surprising
restriction to so few species, the restriction of its geographic
origins to so few homelands, and its subsequent geographic
expansion from those homelands. I then discuss the conse-
quences of domestication for human societies, the origins
of human infectious diseases, expansions of agricultural
populations, and human evolution. After posing the
unresolved questions that I would most like to see answered,
I conclude by speculating about possible future domestica-
tions of plants and animals, and of ourselves. By a
domesticate, I mean a species bred in captivity and thereby
modified from its wild ancestors in ways making it more
useful to humans who control its reproduction and (in
the case of animals) its food supply. Domestication is thus
distinct
from
mere
taming
of
wild-born
animals.
Hannibal’s African war elephants were, and modern Asian
work elephants still are, just tamed wild individuals, not
individuals of a genetically distinct population born and
reared in captivity.
In 1997 I summarized available information about
domestication and its consequences for human history
in a book
1
. Since then, new details have continued to
accumulate, and unanswered questions have come into
sharper focus. Sources for statements not specifically
referenced will generally be found in refs 1–9.
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- Fall '08
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