I’ve long entertained the following hypothesis about the origin of our species: millions of years ago, an ape began to take an active interest in its offspring. Children became a resource. Mothers—and others—favoured docile, educable young who would stay close and could be shaped into reproductive allies.
Human consciousness likely co-evolved with this behaviour, insofar as it was manipulative, strategic, and intelligent. Traits we now associate with human uniqueness—extended childhoods, heightened sexuality, increased reproductive capacity, juvenile anatomy—thus result from intentional selection. This is not domestication by God or Nature, but by individual apes like you and me, generation after generation.
Mainstream biology, by contrast, describes humans as a ‘self-domesticated’ species, meaning these traits supposedly emerged unintentionally through natural selection. This narrative subtly downplays the role of parental intention in human evolution, casting our ancestors’ purposive behaviours as biologically irrelevant in a mechanistic universe. It sustains a certain orthodoxy—a mistaken reverence for Darwin, the ‘Father of Evolution’—as if to exempt parents from any responsibility in the matter. But the fact remains: humans exert a significant degree of control over each other’s reproduction and care, not just that of other species. This fact demands a biological explanation, not a moral or philosophical one.
Consider how societies, families, and spouses make decisions about human ownership—who belongs to whom, who may have children with whom. At what point did this intentional control supersede natural selection? Clearly, humans have long instructed our children deliberately. We establish enduring relationships across generations, enforcing reproductive norms such as marriage and incest taboos. These result in symbolic, multigenerational homes unlike anything found in the animal kingdom—predating sedentary life and the domestication of other species. Darwin, for all his brilliance, may not have disagreed—though for someone who married his cousin, it might have been difficult to admit.
Our multigenerational bond extends to plants and animals we have chosen to domesticate. When humans domesticated dogs, we already had the capacity to domesticate plants—but delayed doing so for another 10–20,000 years. Why? Dogs resemble children: they are responsive, educable, loyal, and mobile. These traits made them valuable and consistent with the existing social order, unlike plants.
Therefore, the idea that dogs ‘self-domesticated’ by hovering near human settlements—popularized by anthropologists like Richard Wrangham—misses the deeper pattern. According to this view, less aggressive wolves gained an advantage by scavenging around humans, and over generations, this led to greater tameness without any deliberate breeding. Humans, in turn, benefited passively from cleaner camps and eventual companionship. But this model leaves out a crucial fact: by that point, humans had long been domesticating their own offspring. Indeed, unlike the young of any other primate, humans do not join other groups. We remain tied to our natal group, obey its commands, and become integrated into a phylogenetic tree.
Dogs, too, came to live this way. It is entirely plausible that early humans stole or adopted wolf cubs and raised them. Even without formal breeding, such acts would have selected for responsiveness and attachment. In that sense, dogs, like children, became beings who stay close, listen, and belong—not by accident, but because we made them so.
Domestication, then, is closely linked to what I call the behaviour of language: the human-specific ability to get signal receivers to respond to our signals, rather than merely reacting to stimuli. Imagine an early human beckoning a wild wolf to eat. The act depends not just on food, but on getting the animal to respond to the gesture. Today, dogs are masters of interpreting our spoken commands and pointing gestures. But that ability reflects a much older pattern—what ancestral apes began doing with their own children, and later with wolves: ensuring that the receivers of their signals would respond to them, and not to others. In our case, the spoken commands became stories, stories that tell us what is good, what is bad, and what kind of humans we ought to become. They shape the breeds we raise—our children, our companions—and bind them to us through meaning.
Hence, the question of who is our own master—if we, as a species, are the masters of dogs—has a simple answer: our masters are our ancestors. We were domesticated by our elders, who were in turn domesticated by theirs, likely all the way back to the split from the other apes. We were not domesticated by natural selection, culture, God, or any other abstract entity. Our tendency to believe in these authorities only reveals our longing for those masters, their stories, and our unconscious desire to be masters ourselves.