Did humans domesticate themselves?

This article presents new genetic evidence from a study showing that humans probably self-domesticated themselves to select for pro-social traits. The original journal article compared the genomes of anatomically modern humans to genomes of other domesticated species (i.e. cows and dogs) and their wild types (i.e. wolves and Neanderthals). It claims that AMH and domesticated species do share overlapping genes that are associated with domestication traits. Such domestication traits are associated with docile phenotypes and behaviors. There was also no significant overlapping between AMH and Neanderthals. In case of random overlapping, researchers made sure to also compare human and domesticated species genomes to greater apes and found that this wasn't the case, which is positive evidence for self-domestication. They also looked at nearly fixed ancestral or derived SNPs in archaic lineages that have variants in AMH that would represent "under-domesticated" traits. Using other literature sources, they found that there's an ancestral mutation related to symptoms of aggressiveness and developmental delays in certain AMH diseases. Lastly, they noticed there were changes in genes associated with neural crest development in AMH from Neanderthals/Denisovans that were the same changes seen in neural development of self-domesticated species. This study can improve our understanding of why social cooperation so clearly defines modern human cognition.

Paulette Ma