After posing the unresolved questions that I would most like to see answered, I conclude by speculating about possible future domestications of plants and animals, and of ourselves. I then discuss the consequences of domestication for human societies, the origins of human infectious diseases, expansions of agricultural populations, and human evolution. Much of this review is devoted to domestication itself: its origins, the biological changes involved, its surprising restriction to so few species, the restriction of its geographic origins to so few homelands, and its subsequent geographic expansion from those homelands. Those localized origins of domestication ultimately explain why this international journal of science is published in an Indo-European language rather than in Basque, Swahili, Quechua or Pitjantjatjara. Through that head start, the inhabitants of those two areas spread their languages and genes over much of the rest of the world. As a result of those replacements, about 88% of all humans alive today speak some language belonging to one or another of a mere seven language families confined in the early Holocene to two small areas of Eurasia that happened to become the earliest centres of domestication - the Fertile Crescent and parts of China. Because domestication ultimately yielded agents of conquest (for example, guns, germs and steel) but arose in only a few areas of the world, and in certain of those areas earlier than in others, the peoples who through biogeographic luck first acquired domesticates acquired enormous advantages over other peoples and expanded. It interests all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, because it provides most of our food today, it was prerequisite to the rise of civilization, and it transformed global demography. Plant and animal domestication is the most important development in the past 13,000 years of human history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |