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In animals[edit]


Smaller skulls on tame animals have been noticed in other species. Noticing that a dog's skull looks like that of a juvenile wolf, Richard Wrangham goes on to say that "this leads to the thought that species can self-domesticate."[1] Other characteristics that are associated with juvenility – barking and meowing (sounds used by wolf cubs and kittens of large felines, respectively, to communicate with their parents), more playful and less aggressive, and more eager to learn – are seen in tame animals.[citation needed]




The distance an animal will allow a human to approach before it runs away, or escape distance, is a measure of tameness. Wild wolves are both aggressive and quick to flee from humans, but they are the ancestors of dogs. Biologist Raymond Coppinger, in work with wild wolves, finds that directly taming a wild wolf is very difficult, and must begin before the animal is nineteen days old. He finds it far more likely that "the wolves domesticated themselves" (self-domesticated) into dogs over time, when wolves that could tolerate the closeness of humans were better able to find food in human village waste, and therefore those wolves' survival was enhanced.[3]



Belyaev and his successors also selectively bred wild rats for tameness, with similar results.[5] These results with selective breeding suggest that the natural process of self-domestication can occur within a single human generation.

In humans[edit]

Self-domestication describes theories of how humans developed and evolved. The idea of self-domestication was used by early Social Darwinism which, according to psychiatrist Martin Brüne in an article "On human self-domestication",[6] developed from the idea that humans could perfect themselves biologically.



See also[edit]


  2. ^ Driscoll, Carlos A. et al. (2007-07-27). "The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication" (PDF). Science 317 (5837): 519–23. doi:10.1126/science.1139518. PMID 17600185. Retrieved 2008-04-02. 
  3. ^ Dogs That Changed the World: What caused the domestication of wolves? PBS television series, September, 2008
  4. ^ Wade, Nicholas (25 July 2006). "Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe It’s All in the Genes". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 February 2015. 
  6. ^ Brüne, Martin (2007). "On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics". Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2 (1): 21. doi:10.1186/1747-5341-2-21. PMC 2082022. PMID 17919321. 