This is good. Are you suggesting that human (female) domestication primarily occurred after people shifted away from hunt/gather? Or after geographic dispersion as groups consolidated and competed for territory? The latter seems more likely as all modern humans (African through Polynesian) seem similarly domesticated. Of course this suggests African women are likely the most domesticated.
I'm glad you found it interesting! The answer is that more advanced pastoral and agrarian civilizations would likely create the most selective pressure under this model. Groups that advanced earlier would have been exposed to those pressures earlier on; they would also be expected to have larger population sizes, and the rate of evolutionary change is proportional to population size. But the rate of change for groups that remained under these oppressive conditions would be even faster moving into the historical period. You mentioned Africa, but perhaps Asia had some of the populations best fitting this description?
Alternatively, it might be possible to look at the characteristics of the Khoisan, or the Aboriginal Australians. If these people never had pastoralism or agriculture, and didn't intermarry to a significant extent with other populations, then they would form natural control groups.
My sense is that female 'domestication' predated the move to gardening/pastoral just because later (ie more recent) evolution would imply greater variation in human nature than I have seen. A Khosian comparison group would be interesting. High levels of Denisovian intermixture may be a problem with Aboriginal Australian and Melanesians (they have a high rate of reported domestic violence for what it is worth).
That said I suspect that in long term 'merchant class' Han Chinese society there has been recent (ie past 2,000 years) selection for traits that help them perform (and reproduce) in urban environments (this could also be the case for Ashkenazi jews). Though I have heard a contrary argument that city populations are largely sustained by inward migration.
> later (ie more recent) evolution would imply greater variation in human nature than I have seen.
Earlier shifts are feasible, given that all you *really* need is rope. But later shifts may still not have generated huge variation if the selection effect were weak, or if there were enough admixture between populations. Pastoralists and agrarans often existed side by side with foragers.
You know, I read all the same things you do. What I took from Wrangham is that humans have meetings, one can call them meals, and at these evening get-togethers, we work out the next days activities, and in doing that we each make the world we live in, domestically or not. I'll admit rope is helpful in domestication,,,
>>Lately there’s been a lot of discussion around substack on humans being a self-domesticated species which shows low levels of reactive aggression, etc.
You mean people are discussing my favoure subject and my favorite writer and I haven't noticed a thing? I'm off as usual.
On topic: If I get you right, you more or less offer an explanation to self-domestication that focuses on the female side of evolution. As an alternative/a complement to Richard Wrangham's male focused explanation. Is your theory then that all or most human domestication tendencies evolved through the female side, because females were the first to be enslaved and thereby the most similar to domesticated animals?
You're reading me correctly. But, while you can absolutely call this a complement to Wrangham's perspective, I really don't like his model. The loss of reactive aggression that might be caused by a few coordinated murders providing selection against hypermasculinity really may have happened, and who knows, it really may have had far-reaching consequences. But it just isn't domestication. Domestication syndrome is such a strong pattern of decreased limb length, increased sensitivity to nonverbal cues, increased fertility, and so on, and most of it makes sense only in the context of suite of characteristics developed by a group that's been developing in captivity.
I also want to stress that I'm aware that this is more of an idea than a robust framework for understanding humanity. It's interesting, or maybe funny, or depressing, or sometimes even surprising to see the way pieces fit - and many pieces do fit, including a few more than I could cram into this post. But it's probably also answering a more modest question than what people like Wrangham are trying to answer. The process I'm describing seems relatively recent, and it doesn't explain behavioral modernity. Instead, if it's correct, it will just help to illuminate what we're like today, and maybe give a sense of how we used to be different.
What do you think of Richard Wrangham's theory of the self-domestication of the bonobo then? No one domesticated the bonobo in the strict sense of the word. And Wrangham still claims the Bonobo is a domesticated ape just like humans, just to a lesser degree.
For that reason I interprete Wrangham's theory of the violent demise of the alpha male as the tip of an iceberg. I have understood Wrangham like he means that being less aggressive was good among humans (and bonobos) on a multitude of occasions, but the most obvious is when beta males simply kill off upstarts.
For that reason I thought that your theory went very well together with Wrangham's theory. (Although I haven't read the paper you are refererring to, I only read some of Wrangham's books)
The first thing is most trivial. Yes, Gorillas are present in chimpanzee territory but not in bonobo territory. Does this mean bonobos domesticated themselves, or does it mean gorillas hardened chimps up?
Secondly, and more critically, does the bonobo show domestication syndrome? Somewhat, but not consistently. It has
This is different from human women, which show *all* of those domestication syndrome traits, without any reversals.
Thirdly, why are even we calling this domestication? Was there any breeding in captivity?
There's an old saying that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." It's really weird to me that Hare and Wrangham have this domestication hammer they want to use to hit pebbles, knotholes on trees, and twigs sticking out of the dirt, but then miss the very clear, very obvious nail of bride capture in humans. To write "Humans pacified themselves, and Bonobos sexualized themselves," may or may not be true; no matter what, though, at least that makes sense. But do they write that? No, in both cases they use the word "domesticated." My response is to shake my head and say that you and Anders use better English than they do.
> I thought that your theory went very well together with Wrangham's theory.
I think there's another old saying: "To a woman with a drill, two different bits may complement one another very well in her quest to build houses in Sweden."
Human women are less pigmented (have lighter skin) than men. I've always presumed they or a gestating fetus have greater need for Vit E during pregnancy. Most likely the fetus (contributing to optimal development of any of, say, brain, immune system, muscl/skel, etc)
Do you mean vitamin D? It could be, but sexual differences are often the result of sexual selection. Males have generally preferred lighter skinned partners across evolutionary time.
Fundamentally, I get the impression that Richard Wrangham and other male evolutionists are more or less consciously avoiding the female side of evolution. He wrote something in Demonic Males implying "females probably have a part in this, but we are not writing about it". That leaves a lot of things to explain to those few females who are studying human evolution. As long as scientists of both sexes don't feel free to study the female side, the picture will be male-skewed.
One thing I wonder about your theory is: Do you have a control group? How do females of other species relate to males? Human females being smaller than human males can not easily be attributed to domestication, since the females of many species are smaller than the males. I guess we need to know to what degree human females show more domestication syndrome than females of other species compared to males.
I also wonder: Do you assume that domesticated traits on females spilled over on their sons? Did males subsequently get less aggressive, more flat-faced and so on because their mothers were?
As a carpenter, I know that hammers can be useful to many more things than nails. Basically, Richard Wrangham assumes that the same biological processes are at play whenever reduced aggression is selected for. You are right that "domestication" is a far too narrow expression to use in that sense: He doesn't actually mean domestication, but reduction of reactive aggression. Wrangham assumes that the same biological process gives rise to different physical symptoms in different species or even in different breeds of the same species. For example, German Shepherd dogs have ears and tails that look like those of wolfs. But German Shepherds are not more wolf-like to their personalities than many other dog breeds, as far as I know. German shepherds are an obviously domesticated species, but they don't show all domestication syndromes that are possible for a dog. (comparison between German Shepherd and wolf: The dogs obviously show a number of domesticated traits https://www.germanshepherd101.com/german-shepherd-vs-wolf/ )
If the German shepherd dogs don't show all the traits of domestication, wouldn't it be fair to assume that humans and bonobos can be affected by the same biological processes as the German shepherd, although we also show far from all of the domestication syndromes?
> One thing I wonder about your theory is: Do you have a control group?
I used sex differences in chimps as the control to compare sex differences in humans. Was that not clear? I figured bonobos would come up in conversation; should I have done something else?
> Do you assume that domesticated traits on females spilled over on their sons? Did males subsequently get less aggressive, more flat-faced and so on because their mothers were?
Yes. That's something I absolutely left out of the post, but I was aware while I wrote it that sex-linked traits can spill over into the other sex, because many genes coding for a trait in one sex won't differentiate between the sexes in their expression. Evolution would probably have liked to make males without nipples, but better to have males with nipples than females without nipples.
Even presuming my model is correct, it's hard to know how much of domestication syndrome would have spilled over into males. But anything across the entire human species that can't easily be explained through any other means could be attributed to domestication of females, or even from the limited domestication of males by.
> If the German shepherd dogs don't show all the traits of domestication, wouldn't it be fair to assume that humans and bonobos can be affected by the same biological processes as the German shepherd, although we also show far from all of the domestication syndromes?
Are there traits on which wolves appear more domesticated than German Shepherds? I have no problem with domestication syndrome affecting most traits rather than all, but chimpanzees show reduced pigmentation and limb length relative to bonobos. As for humans, the most significant difference between us and other hominids is our enormous encephalization, with other traits supporting it like longer gestation times - that's the opposite of domestication syndrome.
>>I used sex differences in chimps as the control to compare sex differences in humans. Was that not clear? I figured bonobos would come up in conversation; should I have done something else?
My thoughts just started to wander to elephants, hamadryas baboons, cats... Females are the more pro-social sex in most group-living species and it would be interesting to compare all those domestication syndrome traits between different species. I don't say that you should do it, but I think someone should do it.
I suspect I'm taking your theory more seriously than you are doing yourself. But I think there is something in it. In Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham points out that chimpanzee males and human males are actually rather similar. They both cooperate in wars against their neighbors. The big difference is the scale. Chimpanzee males can cooperate in groups of a few individuals. Humans can cooperate in hundreds or millions. Basically, human males are like chimpanzee males, but less spontaneously aggressive and more strategic.
This higher ability to cooperate allows human males to oppress females, while chimpanzee males are just capable of brutalizing their females. Being brutalized and being oppressed are two different things. That difference, and some others, makes human females and chimpanzee females very different. And that makes me think that you are entirely right that small steps in the evolution of human males led to big steps in the evolution of human females.
>>Are there traits on which wolves appear more domesticated than German Shepherds?
No. Not as far as I know. But German Shepherds and wolfs are so superficially similar that homepages for dog aficionados need to point out the differences. Meanwhile, the feared pitbull terrier actually has floppy ears. I think that indicates that visible domestication syndrome is a rather weak proxy for loss of aggression. For that reason, I suspect that many pieces are needed in order to form an approximate picture of who is the more and less domesticated/deaggressioned. For example, the blackness of the bonobos might have been a result of simple genetic drift. The domestication syndrome theory is so unclear that one or two traits don't count for much.
Edit: I mean, more or less, that the self domestication theory is a weak theory. One or another detail that doesn't fit into it doesn't make it much weaker, because it already is weak.
This is good. Are you suggesting that human (female) domestication primarily occurred after people shifted away from hunt/gather? Or after geographic dispersion as groups consolidated and competed for territory? The latter seems more likely as all modern humans (African through Polynesian) seem similarly domesticated. Of course this suggests African women are likely the most domesticated.
I'm glad you found it interesting! The answer is that more advanced pastoral and agrarian civilizations would likely create the most selective pressure under this model. Groups that advanced earlier would have been exposed to those pressures earlier on; they would also be expected to have larger population sizes, and the rate of evolutionary change is proportional to population size. But the rate of change for groups that remained under these oppressive conditions would be even faster moving into the historical period. You mentioned Africa, but perhaps Asia had some of the populations best fitting this description?
Alternatively, it might be possible to look at the characteristics of the Khoisan, or the Aboriginal Australians. If these people never had pastoralism or agriculture, and didn't intermarry to a significant extent with other populations, then they would form natural control groups.
My sense is that female 'domestication' predated the move to gardening/pastoral just because later (ie more recent) evolution would imply greater variation in human nature than I have seen. A Khosian comparison group would be interesting. High levels of Denisovian intermixture may be a problem with Aboriginal Australian and Melanesians (they have a high rate of reported domestic violence for what it is worth).
That said I suspect that in long term 'merchant class' Han Chinese society there has been recent (ie past 2,000 years) selection for traits that help them perform (and reproduce) in urban environments (this could also be the case for Ashkenazi jews). Though I have heard a contrary argument that city populations are largely sustained by inward migration.
I'll look through your substack in the weekend
> later (ie more recent) evolution would imply greater variation in human nature than I have seen.
Earlier shifts are feasible, given that all you *really* need is rope. But later shifts may still not have generated huge variation if the selection effect were weak, or if there were enough admixture between populations. Pastoralists and agrarans often existed side by side with foragers.
> I'll look through your substack in the weekend
I'm guessing you may want to start with https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/most-models-arent-even-useful
Also read referenced paper https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B70C0490CEFFFB3B5231A5426A1D1577/S2513843X21000207a.pdf/targeted-conspiratorial-killing-human-self-domestication-and-the-evolution-of-groupishness.pdf
Yes, I've read that; it's referenced at footnote 7.
You know, I read all the same things you do. What I took from Wrangham is that humans have meetings, one can call them meals, and at these evening get-togethers, we work out the next days activities, and in doing that we each make the world we live in, domestically or not. I'll admit rope is helpful in domestication,,,
>>Lately there’s been a lot of discussion around substack on humans being a self-domesticated species which shows low levels of reactive aggression, etc.
You mean people are discussing my favoure subject and my favorite writer and I haven't noticed a thing? I'm off as usual.
On topic: If I get you right, you more or less offer an explanation to self-domestication that focuses on the female side of evolution. As an alternative/a complement to Richard Wrangham's male focused explanation. Is your theory then that all or most human domestication tendencies evolved through the female side, because females were the first to be enslaved and thereby the most similar to domesticated animals?
You're reading me correctly. But, while you can absolutely call this a complement to Wrangham's perspective, I really don't like his model. The loss of reactive aggression that might be caused by a few coordinated murders providing selection against hypermasculinity really may have happened, and who knows, it really may have had far-reaching consequences. But it just isn't domestication. Domestication syndrome is such a strong pattern of decreased limb length, increased sensitivity to nonverbal cues, increased fertility, and so on, and most of it makes sense only in the context of suite of characteristics developed by a group that's been developing in captivity.
I also want to stress that I'm aware that this is more of an idea than a robust framework for understanding humanity. It's interesting, or maybe funny, or depressing, or sometimes even surprising to see the way pieces fit - and many pieces do fit, including a few more than I could cram into this post. But it's probably also answering a more modest question than what people like Wrangham are trying to answer. The process I'm describing seems relatively recent, and it doesn't explain behavioral modernity. Instead, if it's correct, it will just help to illuminate what we're like today, and maybe give a sense of how we used to be different.
What do you think of Richard Wrangham's theory of the self-domestication of the bonobo then? No one domesticated the bonobo in the strict sense of the word. And Wrangham still claims the Bonobo is a domesticated ape just like humans, just to a lesser degree.
For that reason I interprete Wrangham's theory of the violent demise of the alpha male as the tip of an iceberg. I have understood Wrangham like he means that being less aggressive was good among humans (and bonobos) on a multitude of occasions, but the most obvious is when beta males simply kill off upstarts.
For that reason I thought that your theory went very well together with Wrangham's theory. (Although I haven't read the paper you are refererring to, I only read some of Wrangham's books)
Well, the bonobo idea is really Hare's, though Wrangham was definitely involved (he does have credit as third author: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000334721100546X ) As for what I think about Bonobo domestication, I think three things.
The first thing is most trivial. Yes, Gorillas are present in chimpanzee territory but not in bonobo territory. Does this mean bonobos domesticated themselves, or does it mean gorillas hardened chimps up?
Secondly, and more critically, does the bonobo show domestication syndrome? Somewhat, but not consistently. It has
Smaller rostrum: https://ielc.libguides.com/sdzg/factsheets/bonobo/characteristics
Smaller ears: ibid
Less aggression: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tame-theory-did-bonobos/
Smaller brain: ibid
Earlier puberty: https://www.mpg.de/8326482/female-bonobos-puberty
But also
Longer limbs: https://www.britannica.com/animal/bonobo
Darker pigmentation: https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/bonobo
This is different from human women, which show *all* of those domestication syndrome traits, without any reversals.
Thirdly, why are even we calling this domestication? Was there any breeding in captivity?
There's an old saying that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." It's really weird to me that Hare and Wrangham have this domestication hammer they want to use to hit pebbles, knotholes on trees, and twigs sticking out of the dirt, but then miss the very clear, very obvious nail of bride capture in humans. To write "Humans pacified themselves, and Bonobos sexualized themselves," may or may not be true; no matter what, though, at least that makes sense. But do they write that? No, in both cases they use the word "domesticated." My response is to shake my head and say that you and Anders use better English than they do.
> I thought that your theory went very well together with Wrangham's theory.
I think there's another old saying: "To a woman with a drill, two different bits may complement one another very well in her quest to build houses in Sweden."
Human women are less pigmented (have lighter skin) than men. I've always presumed they or a gestating fetus have greater need for Vit E during pregnancy. Most likely the fetus (contributing to optimal development of any of, say, brain, immune system, muscl/skel, etc)
Do you mean vitamin D? It could be, but sexual differences are often the result of sexual selection. Males have generally preferred lighter skinned partners across evolutionary time.
Fundamentally, I get the impression that Richard Wrangham and other male evolutionists are more or less consciously avoiding the female side of evolution. He wrote something in Demonic Males implying "females probably have a part in this, but we are not writing about it". That leaves a lot of things to explain to those few females who are studying human evolution. As long as scientists of both sexes don't feel free to study the female side, the picture will be male-skewed.
One thing I wonder about your theory is: Do you have a control group? How do females of other species relate to males? Human females being smaller than human males can not easily be attributed to domestication, since the females of many species are smaller than the males. I guess we need to know to what degree human females show more domestication syndrome than females of other species compared to males.
I also wonder: Do you assume that domesticated traits on females spilled over on their sons? Did males subsequently get less aggressive, more flat-faced and so on because their mothers were?
As a carpenter, I know that hammers can be useful to many more things than nails. Basically, Richard Wrangham assumes that the same biological processes are at play whenever reduced aggression is selected for. You are right that "domestication" is a far too narrow expression to use in that sense: He doesn't actually mean domestication, but reduction of reactive aggression. Wrangham assumes that the same biological process gives rise to different physical symptoms in different species or even in different breeds of the same species. For example, German Shepherd dogs have ears and tails that look like those of wolfs. But German Shepherds are not more wolf-like to their personalities than many other dog breeds, as far as I know. German shepherds are an obviously domesticated species, but they don't show all domestication syndromes that are possible for a dog. (comparison between German Shepherd and wolf: The dogs obviously show a number of domesticated traits https://www.germanshepherd101.com/german-shepherd-vs-wolf/ )
If the German shepherd dogs don't show all the traits of domestication, wouldn't it be fair to assume that humans and bonobos can be affected by the same biological processes as the German shepherd, although we also show far from all of the domestication syndromes?
> One thing I wonder about your theory is: Do you have a control group?
I used sex differences in chimps as the control to compare sex differences in humans. Was that not clear? I figured bonobos would come up in conversation; should I have done something else?
> Do you assume that domesticated traits on females spilled over on their sons? Did males subsequently get less aggressive, more flat-faced and so on because their mothers were?
Yes. That's something I absolutely left out of the post, but I was aware while I wrote it that sex-linked traits can spill over into the other sex, because many genes coding for a trait in one sex won't differentiate between the sexes in their expression. Evolution would probably have liked to make males without nipples, but better to have males with nipples than females without nipples.
Even presuming my model is correct, it's hard to know how much of domestication syndrome would have spilled over into males. But anything across the entire human species that can't easily be explained through any other means could be attributed to domestication of females, or even from the limited domestication of males by.
> If the German shepherd dogs don't show all the traits of domestication, wouldn't it be fair to assume that humans and bonobos can be affected by the same biological processes as the German shepherd, although we also show far from all of the domestication syndromes?
Are there traits on which wolves appear more domesticated than German Shepherds? I have no problem with domestication syndrome affecting most traits rather than all, but chimpanzees show reduced pigmentation and limb length relative to bonobos. As for humans, the most significant difference between us and other hominids is our enormous encephalization, with other traits supporting it like longer gestation times - that's the opposite of domestication syndrome.
>>I used sex differences in chimps as the control to compare sex differences in humans. Was that not clear? I figured bonobos would come up in conversation; should I have done something else?
My thoughts just started to wander to elephants, hamadryas baboons, cats... Females are the more pro-social sex in most group-living species and it would be interesting to compare all those domestication syndrome traits between different species. I don't say that you should do it, but I think someone should do it.
I suspect I'm taking your theory more seriously than you are doing yourself. But I think there is something in it. In Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham points out that chimpanzee males and human males are actually rather similar. They both cooperate in wars against their neighbors. The big difference is the scale. Chimpanzee males can cooperate in groups of a few individuals. Humans can cooperate in hundreds or millions. Basically, human males are like chimpanzee males, but less spontaneously aggressive and more strategic.
This higher ability to cooperate allows human males to oppress females, while chimpanzee males are just capable of brutalizing their females. Being brutalized and being oppressed are two different things. That difference, and some others, makes human females and chimpanzee females very different. And that makes me think that you are entirely right that small steps in the evolution of human males led to big steps in the evolution of human females.
>>Are there traits on which wolves appear more domesticated than German Shepherds?
No. Not as far as I know. But German Shepherds and wolfs are so superficially similar that homepages for dog aficionados need to point out the differences. Meanwhile, the feared pitbull terrier actually has floppy ears. I think that indicates that visible domestication syndrome is a rather weak proxy for loss of aggression. For that reason, I suspect that many pieces are needed in order to form an approximate picture of who is the more and less domesticated/deaggressioned. For example, the blackness of the bonobos might have been a result of simple genetic drift. The domestication syndrome theory is so unclear that one or two traits don't count for much.
Edit: I mean, more or less, that the self domestication theory is a weak theory. One or another detail that doesn't fit into it doesn't make it much weaker, because it already is weak.