Domestication of Plants and Animals

This topic studies how wild plants and animals were transformed into domesticated crops and livestock, the biological and behavioural process at the heart of agricultural origins.

Definition

The study of the evolutionary process by which wild species were brought under human management and altered genetically and morphologically into domesticated crops and animals.

Scope

It covers the morphological and genetic changes that mark domestication—such as non-shattering cereals and reduced body size in livestock—and the archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological methods used to detect them. The topic examines the multiple independent centres of domestication, the species involved, and the protracted, often unintentional nature of the process by which humans and other species entered relationships of mutual dependence.

Core questions

• What biological changes distinguish domesticated from wild species?
• How do archaeologists detect domestication in plant and animal remains?
• Where and when were the major crops and livestock domesticated?
• Was domestication a rapid event or a gradual, protracted process?

Key theories

Protracted domestication

The model, advanced by Zeder and others, that domestication of both plants and animals was a slow, multi-generational process of management and co-evolution rather than a sudden invention, leaving gradual signatures in the archaeological record.

Centres of origin

The framework, rooted in Vavilov's and Harlan's work, that crops were domesticated in a limited number of geographic centres, each with distinctive wild progenitors and domesticate suites.

History

Study of domestication was framed by Vavilov's early-20th-century identification of centres of crop diversity and advanced by Robert Braidwood's interdisciplinary fieldwork at Jarmo. The growth of archaeobotany and zooarchaeology, the application of radiocarbon dating, and more recently genetics and morphometrics have allowed researchers to trace domestication as a gradual process across several world regions.

Debates

Rapid versus protracted domestication

Scholars debate whether domestication occurred relatively quickly through deliberate selection or unfolded slowly over centuries or millennia as an unintended consequence of cultivation and herding, with morphometric evidence supporting protracted models.

Key figures

• Melinda Zeder
• Jack Harlan
• Nikolai Vavilov
• Dorian Fuller

Seminal works

• harlan1992
• zeder2011

Frequently asked questions

How do we know a plant or animal was domesticated?

Archaeologists look for morphological changes such as larger or non-shattering seeds and altered animal size or demography, alongside contextual and genetic evidence of human management.

Were the same species domesticated everywhere?

No. Different regions domesticated different species, such as wheat and barley in the Near East, rice and millet in China, and maize, beans, and squash in the Americas.