CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 192Pleistocene-Era Hominins and ArchaeologyLanguage and cultural evolutionArchaeology and ancient environmental studies

Human domestication reconsidered.

Leach, Helen M.·2003·Current Anthropology
DOI 10.1086/368119
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

In scientific usage, domestication has come to mean the process by which humans transformed wild animals and plants into more useful products through control of their breeding. Certain physical and behavioural changes have been identified as criteria of domestication. They include morphological changes affecting the skeletons of early Middle Eastern domesticates (e.g., reduction in size and skeletal robusticity, craniofacial shortening, and declining tooth size). These changes also occur in some human populations starting in the Late Pleistocene. Unconscious selection pressures are increasingly invoked in explanations of both sets of data. The longestablished paradigm of human control over domestication through artificial selection has meant that parallelism in these changes is seldom noted and few inclusive explanations have been attempted since the early 1900s. Recently, only symbolic and social domestication has been accepted for Homo sapiens. This article proposes a preliminary case for human biological domestication based on the effects of the built environment, decreased mobility, and changes in diet consistency associated with increasing sedentism.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1086/368119

Cites

110 of 110 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than other species of Homo.

    “Parallels in anatomy between humans and domesticated mammals suggest that for the last 300,000 years, Homo sapiens has experienced more intense selection against the propensity for reactive aggression than other species of Homo.”

    From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Leach, 2003

  • All four features used by archeologists to recognize a domesticated species in the fossil record are found in H. sapiens.

    “Leach showed that all four traits are found in H. sapiens, although cranial capacity was not reduced until the end of the Pleistocene and the significance of its reduction has been challenged (Ruff et al., 1997).”

    From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Leach, 2003

  • The anatomical evidence for similarities between H. sapiens and domesticated animals is particularly strong.

    “While there are various physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and genetic similarities between H. sapiens and domesticated animals, the anatomical evidence is particularly strong (Leach, 2003).”

    From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Leach, 2003

  • Evidence has recently been increasing for humans Homo sapiens having a domestication syndrome.

    “It is interesting, therefore, that evidence has recently been increasing for humans Homo sapiens having a domestication syndrome (Leach, 2003; Francis, 2015; Henrich, 2016; Hare, 2017; Hare and Wrangham, 2017; Theofanopoulou et al., 2017; Wilkins, 2017; Benítez-Burraco et al., 2018; Sánchez-Villagra and van Schaik, 2019; Wrangham, 2019).”

    From Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication (2019) · cites this paper as Leach, 2003

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Leach, H. M.
Corresponding author
Leach, Helen M.
ORCID
Leach, Helen M.
Venue
Current Anthropology
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Published
2003-06
Volume
44
Issue
3
Pages
349-368
ISSN
  • 0011-3204 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5382
DOI
10.1086/368119
OpenAlex
W2108883106
Cited by
192
References
110
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 15 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 4
FWCI
17.59
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Current Anthropology (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
  • Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Archaeology and ancient environmental studies
Keywords
human domestication, selective breeding, skeletal robusticity, tooth size reduction, built environment, sedentism, diet consistency, human evolution, Middle East

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review