Two Very Different and Popular Views on Plant Domestication

 Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel"

Using archaeological evidence found during excavations which uncovered granaries for wheat and Barley at  Dhra', Jordan, Diamond demonstrates his belief that people were forced into farming and storing because of the bleak environmental conditions caused by the Younger Dryas.

Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire"   

(The entire documentary can be accessed at: http://video.pbs.org/video/1283872815/)

              

  

Pollan takes on a completely different view on domestication seeing it more as a coevolution between humans and non-humans that would eventually lead to codependency between species. In an attempt to answer the age old question of "why domesticated plants exist?", he delves into the biological, chemical, and social changes both actors go through in during the process of domestication.

Haiku Inspired by "The Botany of Desire"

Desire for more

Mutual Understanding

Domestication

Quasi Domestication?

                                  African Wild Cat                        Domesticated House Cat

The African wild cat and the domesticated house cat show similar morphological resemblances. Dr. Carlos Driscoll believes that these similarities are caused by the fact that cats invited themselves into our lives or rather that they underwent a process of what he calls "self-domestication". Driscoll has shown that most domestic cats are related to the descended from a Middle Eastern wildcat and became what we know today through a process of behavioral selection that begun12,000 years ago (1).

Excavation at the site of Shillourokambos in Cyprus has discovered a tomb with a cat burial in association with human remains which date from 7,500-7,000 B.C. Due to the islands distance from the continent this discovery has been viewed as human's intentional introduction of a domesticated, or at least tame, cat species to the island.  Dr. Jean-Denis Vigne explains that this process of self-domestication could have started due to the fact that "cats were attracted into the villages because mice came to eat the stored grain” (2).

Shillourokambos Cat Skeleton Cast

               
References
1. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/brief_cats.html?c=y&page=1
2. http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/292.htm

Silver Fox Domestication

In 1959, biologist Dmitry Belyaev of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Russian Academy of Science in Novosi- birsk, Russia began to selectively breed silver foxes based on behavior and tolerance to human interaction. By the mid 1960's scientists began to notice that a group of foxes were exhibiting what is usually associated with modern domesticated dog behavior. In order to test whether these  changes in behavior were based on genetics or nurture researchers began a cross-upbringing programs where the tame kits were placed with undomesticated mothers and vice versa. Only to find the adoptive mother had very little influence on the kit's behavior towards humans. One of the most interesting things that the project has discovered is that when merely selecting tameness they also began to see the phenotypic changes generally associated with domesticated species: such as: floppy ears, curlier tails, and much more juvenile features than it's wild progenitors. 

Dan Child/©BBC

Dr. Lyudmila Trut, who was a graduate student when the experiment, current director of the program is pictured here with one of the domesticated foxes. 

References

1. Kukekova AV, Temnykh SV, Johnson JL, Trut LN, Acland GM 

  (2012)   Genetics of behavior in the silver fox. Mamm Genome 23(1–2):164–177

2. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/taming-wild-animals/ratliff-text

3. http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/early-canid-domestication-the-farm-fox-experiment/1