domestication

Domestication of Humans: Speciation?

The fossil record continues to grow. And with it, so does the contradiction at the heart of the study of human evolution. Each year brings new hominin fossils—jaws, skulls, infant mandibles—that confuse our picture of early human evolution. Instead of revealing a coherent lineage shaped by adaptive refinement, the evidence points to mounting morphological diversity among hominins that shared time, space, and ecological strategies. This is a problem for the theory of human evolution, as typically framed, because natural selection should reduce such variation—not preserve or multiply it—especially once a powerful adaptation like bipedality or tool use takes hold.

Two recent studies sharpen the problem. In Nature Communications (June 2025), researchers published an analysis of three infant Homo fossils—two from South Africa and one from Ethiopia—dating to around two million years ago. What is striking is that even at this early stage of life, the mandibles already show distinct morphologies. These are not subtle variations of a common type; they reflect different developmental trajectories, pointing to divergence from birth—not as a result of environmental adaptation later in life. These specimens are assigned to different species—Homo habilis, Homo erectus, perhaps others—but the fact that they coexist in time and space suggests that they belong to overlapping populations that did not displace each other.

Meanwhile, a fossilised jawbone from Swartkrans, previously misclassified, has now been identified as belonging to a new species of Paranthropus—gracile and small-toothed, unlike the robust chewing machines that usually define the genus. This adds a second Paranthropus species in southern Africa and, once again, points to parallel lineages, not a tidy succession.

Taken together with other finds (e.g. Homo naledi, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis), this growing list of coexisting species challenges the assumption that evolution within the Homo lineage followed a competitive, progressive logic. Instead of a single, gradually adapting lineage, we see a proliferation of forms—many of them apparently capable, bipedal, and tool-using—spreading not only across Africa but deep into Eurasia and Southeast Asia.

The Ecological Inconsistency

So how do palaeoanthropologists explain this? Most still turn to the logic of branching speciation. Populations become isolated by geography, adapt to local conditions, and evolve along separate paths. This model works reasonably well in ecology. But in this case, it begins to fall apart. Why? Because these groups were not isolated. Many shared the same environments. They used similar tools. They walked upright. Yet their differences persisted and deepened. Even as some lineages remained small-brained or retained arboreal traits, they were not eliminated. Diversity increased instead of narrowing.

This presents a deeper inconsistency. If hominins were already occupying a niche that rewarded bipedality and tool manipulation, then the proliferation of multiple distinct forms within that niche becomes biologically puzzling. In many other genera, physiological and behavioural competence tends to reduce diversity: the best-adapted form outcompetes the rest (see Hardin’s Competitive Exclusion Principle). This is arguably what happened among the Pan lineage, which may have been displaced by Homo across much of its former range. By contrast, the great apes that survive today—Gorilla, Pan, Pongo—are largely allopatric and maintain well-differentiated morphologies suited to distinct ecological roles. They do not blur into one another the way hominins do.

Moreover, many hominin species display a curious mosaic of features—a blend of arboreal adaptations (curved fingers, climbing shoulders) with terrestrial traits (bipedal legs, tool-use morphology)—even when they share the same habitat. If ecological adaptation were the dominant force, we’d expect functional streamlining over time, not persistent mosaicism.

Hominins, however, appear to have proliferated side by side, much like different human ethnicities do today, without consolidating into a single dominant form. We find Paranthropus and Homo sharing space, and multiple Homo forms persisting in parallel. That such morphologically capable beings coexisted rather than converged suggests that we are not looking at different species adapting to different ecological roles. Something else is preserving the variation.

Even leading paleoanthropologists have begun to acknowledge this puzzle. Chris Stringer, once a proponent of the linear ‘Out of Africa’ model, now speaks of a reticulated pattern—a ‘web of populations’—connected by gene flow yet morphologically divergent. While he does not discard the evolutionary framework, his model no longer treats speciation as a clear-cut outcome of ecological pressures. Instead, he concedes that what we are observing may not be traditional species, but something more fluid.

Domestication as an Alternative Explanation

The continued presence of multiple ‘species’ within the same environments suggests that we may not be looking at separate species in the classical sense, but rather breeds or varieties within a socially differentiated population. What we call Homo habilis or Paranthropus robustus may reflect lineages maintained through reproductive control, not ecological separation. The variation is not eliminated because social cohesion is maintained culturally—not by geography, but by group identity, possibly grounded in maternal lineage and early caregiving patterns.

I do not base this on direct evidence from early hominins, but on the way reproductive choices are culturally regulated in Homo sapiens today, and how this pattern produces morphological and behavioural difference today. If this pattern has deep evolutionary roots, then interbreeding among early hominins, while biologically possible, may have been shaped by similar social mechanisms. In this light, distinct lineages could have been created and persisted like specialised varieties in a shared system—diverse, yet maintained by social rather than ecological pressures.

Chimpanzees and bonobos both show strong maternal bonds. In bonobos, mothers remain closely attached to their sons and even influence their sons’ mating success. In humans, these relationships go further: grandmothers and others begin to play roles in managing reproduction. This can only happen when offspring remain in the group, when dispersal is suppressed. And to suppress dispersal, you need attachment (love?).

Attachment between mother and adult child is not a biological necessity. It is a social innovation. The original dependency is turned into an asset—not just for survival, but for recognition, bonding, and group continuity. Over time, this asset becomes a powerful selective force. In such a system, children are not merely tolerated; they are encouraged to remain children. This social pressure selects for individuals who remain juvenile longer—both in form and in behaviour. This helps explain why neotenous traits appear in the fossil findings as stable, heritable features. They are hallmarks of a system where care, recognition, and inclusion become selective forces in their own right.

This is why we must take seriously the symbolic potential of early hominin behaviour. When Homo naledi buries its dead deep in a cave, without tools or fire, we are not seeing instinctual hygiene or shelter behaviour. We are seeing the extension of attachment. The dead body resembles the dependent infant: motionless, helpless, inert. If mothers carried pebbles that resembled babies, as the Makapansgat cobble suggests, then the face of the infant was already being seen as meaningful. And when the infant dies, the bond does not vanish. It finds form—in burial, in ritual, in memory.

Conclusion

All of this—bipedality, neoteny, mosaic traits, suppressed dispersal, symbolic behaviour—forms a coherent trajectory. It is not a trajectory well explained by ecological adaptation. It is explained by active self-domestication—not in the narrow sense of reduced aggression, but as the domestication of the child by the parent, and of the group by itself, through patterns of care, recognition, and exclusion. In this light, what we call speciation may simply be social sorting over time. Morphological variation is preserved and reinforced because it matters to the group, not because it increases survival per se. That is why the fossil record keeps multiplying—not because nature is confused, but because we are still reading social processes as biological divergence.

Domestication of Humans: Abduction

Recent observations of white-faced capuchin monkeys on Jicarón Island in Panama have documented a particularly telling case of a broader behavioural theme. Over a 15-month period, juvenile male capuchins were seen abducting infant howler monkeys. They carried them for days, sometimes until the infants died.

This behaviour does not resemble caregiving, nor does it fit the patterns of hunting or play. It appears instead as a deliberate act of taking and keeping, with no clear purpose beyond the act itself. The howler infants resisted. They cried out to their mothers, who remained nearby. Some capuchins actively chased howler mothers to seize new infants. Over time, the infants stopped struggling—from exhaustion or resignation. But the abduction never became parenting. The capuchins did not feed them; they did not appear to know how.

AI generated image of capuchin monkey holding two juvenile howler monkeys with possessive body language

Even more striking: the behavior spread. This was not an isolated anomaly. Other juvenile males began to imitate the behaviour, suggesting that it became what researchers called a ‘social tradition.’ That is, it propagated through social learning, despite having no adaptive benefit. The infants died. No reproductive or survival advantage was gained. Yet the abductions multiplied.

And crucially, these monkeys had no contact with humans.

Abduction in the Primate Imagination

Primates are known not only for nurturing their young, but also for engaging in possessive behaviours, including abduction. In species ranging from chimpanzees to macaques, individuals have been observed snatching infants from their mothers, sometimes with fatal outcomes. These behaviours can be violent or tender, spontaneous or strategic. They do not always serve an obvious adaptive purpose. And yet, they exist.

Image by Martin Harvey via Getty Images (linked for reference only)

Captive and wild macaques have stolen puppies and carried them around for days. Chimpanzees have taken infants from rival groups or even from members of their own troop. In some cases, these abductions end in infanticide. In others, the infant is carried gently until death from neglect. And occasionally, a strange, uneasy bond may form between the abductor and the abducted—a one-sided intimacy that seems to resemble parenting, yet lacks the elements of functional care. Such cases may suggest a rudimentary form of attachment, not unlike what in human terms might be called a traumatic bond, though the motivations and perceptions of the nonhuman individuals involved remain open to interpretation.

It has often been assumed that these behaviors are rare outliers, or that they are provoked by human interference. But the recent capuchin observations show otherwise: these tendencies are not necessarily distortions—they are part of the primate repertoire.

Domestication as Abduction

The benefits of abduction may not be immediately apparent. However, such acts may create conditions in which something new can emerge. This is where the findings intersect with my broader thesis on the origins of humanity. In my post on dispersal and human society, I suggest that domestication is fundamentally opposed to the natural pattern of dispersal seen in primates. Where dispersal enables the offspring’s independence, domestication inhibits it. It arrests the movement of the young away from their natal group, drawing them into a structure of dependence that is no longer biological, but social, even symbolic.

In this way, abduction may have played a formative role in the emergence of our species. In my work on the ‘Behaviour of Language,’ I argue that humans are an intentionally self-domesticated species—a view that contrasts with mainstream approaches, which describe a passive, natural selection of traits like reduced aggression and increased prosociality. As I explore in ‘Who Domesticated Humans?’ this narrative overlooks the inherently intentional character of domestication—an act of controlling other individuals and their reproduction. These are not just evolutionary trends; they are decisions and actions embedded in interaction and amplified by learning.

In this light, the fact that primates are prone to ‘abduction fads’—even in interspecies cases—seems to support this argument: if abduction is part of the cultural range of primates, then the intentional retention of the offspring becomes not just likely, but evolutionarily grounded. Mothers and others may ‘abduct’ not with violence, but with emotional force. They may hold on to the child not merely to protect it, but to bind it, to keep it from forming bonds in foreign groups or with unacceptable partners. The mother may make herself indispensable. In doing so, she creates a new structure of dependence—a relation in which the child learns to respond to signals, to read her intention. This goes beyond instinct. It is the beginning of a new form of communication and cooperation.

The Sacrifice of the Child

The biblical narrative of Isaac’s sacrifice is unsettling from any point of view. God commands Abraham to kill his own son, Isaac. Without questioning, Abraham obeys. He rises early, prepares the fire, carries the wood, and leads his son to the designated place. Only at the very last moment, as Abraham’s hand is raised with the knife over his son, does a divine voice stop him. A ram appears, caught in the thicket, provided by providence as a substitute.

Traditionally, this intervention has been interpreted as the successful passing of a test: God did not truly desire the actual sacrifice, only the demonstration of obedience. But this reading raises a disturbing paradox. For God, who would later command ‘thou shalt not kill’, here demands exactly that.

The answer might lie in the fact that the killing of children is more acceptable than that of peers, let alone parents. Like domesticated animals, children occupy a subordinate place within the group. The ram thus emerges as a figure that condenses in itself the fate of the child, occupying the same place, the same sacrificial role. The story, covertly but eloquently, is telling us that indeed, parents sacrifice their children just as they sacrifice domesticated animals — precisely because we ourselves are domesticated animals.

The story also reveals a deep ethical conflict. It does not erase the violence of the sacrifice, but rather dramatizes it to process it culturally. It shows us how humanity began to recognise the immorality of child sacrifice. It is, in a certain sense, a moral advance. The tale does not deny that the sacrifice existed, but it begins to signal it as a problem, as something that must be overcome, whilst also seeking to absolve the obedient father. The myth, as so often, speaks the truth in disguise: it keeps the practice alive in cultural memory, yet masked under the form of a moral lesson that allows society to move forward.

Marriage Disguised as Sacrifice

The story of Iphigenia in Greek mythology exposes this same logic with even greater transparency. Agamemnon, to appease Artemis’s wrath and allow the winds to carry his fleet to Troy, must sacrifice his daughter. But instead of facing the horror of the act directly, he employs a stratagem: he deceives his wife Clytemnestra and Iphigenia herself by telling them the young girl is to marry Achilles.

Thus, the marriage rite — a ceremony that, in itself, entails the father giving away his daughter — overlaps with the act of sacrifice. Here, the parallel is stark: the daughter is offered as the property of the father, transferred to another authority (a husband, a goddess), under the justification of duty and honour. What appears to be a social act of continuity (marriage) conceals its sacrificial underside: the absolute surrender of the daughter’s body and life to patriarchal order. Both stories, the biblical and the Greek, point to a common undercurrent: the real and symbolic possibility of sacrificing one’s own children in the name of a higher order.

An Ancestral Practice: Sacrificing the Children

Throughout human history, the real sacrifice of children has been practised as an extreme form of offering or ritual. The examples span millennia.

Around 800,000 years ago at Gran Dolina (Atapuerca), there is clear evidence of human cannibalism, including remains of children with systematic defleshing marks. In Gough’s Cave (England, ~15,000 years ago), children’s bones show signs of being butchered and even turned into ritual containers. At Herxheim (Germany, ~7,000 years ago), bodies of adults and children were dismembered during collective ceremonies. Later, in historical civilisations such as Carthage, the Mexica, or the Inca Empire, child sacrifices were institutionalised to appease agricultural gods or to promote the fertility of the land.

These examples confirm that the instrumentalisation of children as resources — as lives belonging to the group — is not merely a mythical construct, but a material reality of our evolutionary and cultural history.

As orally transmitted myths, the stories of Isaac and Iphigenia draw from much older currents stemming from the ritual sacrifices of the Bronze Age, when the actual practice of human sacrifice began to decline and become taboo. In this sense, it is not so much the precise date of these narratives that matters, but the awareness they reflect: the passage from a bloody and real practice to a dramatized, mythical representation, and finally to symbolic or sublimated forms. These tales thus mirror a particular stage in our species’ moral evolution: the transition from the acceptance of human sacrifice to the cultural search for ways to process its ethical weight.

This process culminates, within the very Abrahamic tradition, with the figure of Jesus Christ, who not only embodies the son destined for sacrifice but voluntarily embraces that fate, entirely shifting the burden of sacrifice onto himself. Jesus is like a new Isaac, but one who walks of his own will to the altar. Moreover, he takes the sublimation of sacrifice to its ultimate symbolic extreme, offering his own flesh and blood to others so that they might quite literally feed on him. It is the height of symbolic transposition, almost sarcastic: the son becomes not only the food but also the feeder, evidencing the self-domestication I have discussed.

The Child as a Domesticated Animal

Many anthropologists have puzzled over this seemingly aberrant practice, but from my point of view, it is entirely understandable. In previous entries on this blog (beginning here), I have proposed that the human species arose through intentional self-domestication. This is no mere metaphor: just as we domesticate animals and plants to gain their cooperation and productivity, we have applied the same logic to our offspring. Domestication means control: control of reproduction, of growth, of autonomy, and of life itself.

As with non-human animals, this implies a profound emotional ambivalence. We love our children as we love our pets, precisely because they depend on us. Their dependence is a source of genuine affection, but also of exploitation. Through this bond — ambivalent, yes, but also deeply compassionate — we have cooperated and built a more complex and, in many ways, better world. Yet we cannot ignore the other side of this coin: we want our children to carry on our projects, to integrate into the system we have built. The child thus becomes a living resource, valuable yet subordinated, serving the continuity of lineage or community.

It is no coincidence that the great narratives of child sacrifice coincide historically with the rise of animal husbandry and domestication. As agricultural societies learned to raise and exploit animals, they also developed a keen awareness that their own children were being treated under similar principles. The tales of sacrifice, like those of Isaac and Iphigenia, are not mere legends or poetic metaphors: they are the direct expression of a real, structural tension within our species.

All gender is male: An ethological perspective

When we observe humanity from a perspective of animal behaviour (ethology), we find something unusual: human females do not look or act like females in most other species. Instead, they exhibit behaviours and characteristics that, in the rest of the animal kingdom, are associated with males competing for mates. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but when we consider my hypothesis that human society has evolved around reproductive control, it makes perfect sense.

A male peacock

In most species, males are the ones who display elaborate fitness signals, competing for female choice. Think of peacocks with their extravagant tails, male deer with their antlers, or lions with their thick manes. These traits are costly, requiring energy and resources, and they exist because males must prove their fitness to gain mating access. Females, on the other hand, usually remain bland, passive, and cryptic in appearance and behaviour—because they don’t need to advertise themselves. They simply choose the best mate available.

A female human?

Humans, however, break this pattern completely. In our species, women also engage in fitness signalling, sometimes even more than men. This is evident in:

Ornamentation and beauty: Women tend to invest in personal appearance, makeup, jewelry, fashion—forms of display that in other species are typical of males.
Sexual signaling: Women, unlike most female mammals, develop permanent secondary sexual characteristics (such as enlarged breasts) that serve as constant reproductive signals, rather than just appearing during estrus.
Social grooming and competition: Women form complex social alliances, engage in status competition, and use indirect aggression—a pattern seen in male-male competition in many other species.

Why does this happen? As I mentioned, the answer may lie in our evolutionary origins: humanity is built on domestication—through the control of the offspring’s reproduction. And the ones who are naturally situated to have the most influence over this process are biological females—mothers.

This is particularly evident when we look at our hunter-gatherer past, which represents the vast majority of human evolutionary history. Unlike agricultural and industrial societies, which are recent and male-dominated in terms of formal political structures, hunter-gatherer societies were fundamentally built around maternal control.

Hunter-gatherers largely avoided material private property, owning no land and accumulating little stored wealth. However, they could hardly escape the need to own other humans, the basic resource necessary to produce descendants. In most other great apes, this is not possible, as individuals disperse from their natal groups upon reaching sexual maturity. So, maintaining cohesive and large breeding groups required some way to prevent dispersal, ensuring stability and cooperative child-rearing.

One way to achieve this is through sexual advertising. Females would have begun to compete to become the reproductive centre, to attract males and females towards them. Had males been the ones in this central position, they would have inevitably competed in a manner similar to hierarchical animal species such as gorillas or lions, where dominance is asserted through direct conflict instead. Such a system would have led—and eventually did lead—to instability, making social cohesion difficult to sustain. Instead, early human societies appear to have followed a different path—one where control over reproduction remained in maternal hands, not through brute force, but through a subtler, sexual form of influence.

This explains why our species is so exceptionally sexual. In a broad sense of animal behaviour, women are akin to males who compete symbolically to attract mates and cooperators who help them have more descendants. This did not simply shape early human societies—it laid the foundation of human civilization. Human societies likely emerged through maternal strategies of influence, fostering long-term stability, but the inherent maleness of this domesticating behaviour paved the way for the direct and aggressive strategies of their sons.

Where does this leave modern Western society? That is a question for another discussion. But if we are to make sense of contemporary conflicts over gender, power, and social organization, we must begin by recognizing the biological and anthropological realities that have shaped us as a species.

Culture and the Myth of Learning

A young chimpanzee, clinging to its mother, will stretch out its hand or make vocal requests for a bite of what the mother is eating. Sometimes, the mother obliges and offers the infant some food; other times, she remains focused on her own meal, leaving the infant to fend for itself. The infant must be persistent, begging repeatedly in hopes of securing nourishment.

This process, common among primates, emphasises that the responsibility for acquiring food falls on the infant. The same is the case with practical skills or knowledge. For example, when a young chimpanzee observes an adult cracking nuts with a stone, the infant is responsible for learning the technique through observation. The mother might facilitate the process a little, but she doesn?t stop to actively teach or guide. She cracks her nuts, and the infant must figure it out by watching and trying on its own.?

This stark contrast between primates and humans suggests that the origin of human culture is in the behaviour of teaching, not learning. Yet, modern scientists keep looking at social learning for clues. Why is that?

Culture

First of all, scientists define culture in terms of social learning, not teaching. This means that teaching cannot be the origin of human culture, by definition!?

Culture is a ?set of learned behaviors, beliefs, and customs that characterize a group, passed down through generations primarily through social learning and observation? (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). Culture is the ?collection of learned behaviors, values, and knowledge that are acquired through socialization and adaptive processes? (Henrich, 2016). Culture is the ?transmission of socially learned knowledge, behaviors, and values from one generation to the next, ensuring the continuity and evolution of group practices? (Mesoudi, 2011).?

The closest those definitions get even to a conservative notion of teaching?a change of behaviour in one individual to facilitate learning in another?is a vague, almost magical notion of ?transmitting? or ?passing down? something. The emphasis is clearly on psychological and theoretical notions such as learning and adaptation, not on behavioural observation.? Anthropologists, ironically, seem reluctant to acknowledge what goes on in the real world of humans, opting instead for an idealised view of human cooperation in which the offspring are always happy to learn.

Modern Myths II

In my previous post, I addressed the fact that humans evolved to prioritise kin cohesion over dispersal, breaking a pattern of primate behaviour that is 50 million years old. In primates, dispersal is the norm, with one sex typically leaving the natal group upon maturity. Humans, on the other hand, stay close to our parents, even into adulthood.?

Here, again, most scientists posit that this happened because we were naturally selected to remain close to kin. This beautiful story of a very special evolutionary process makes us feel more connected to the animal kingdom. Yet, as it occurs today, it was probably our parents?and their parents?who actively wanted us to stay close and help out, just as Homo sapiens did with dogs and other domestic animals, not natural selection.?

This shift to ensuring close family ties allowed for the rise of multigenerational households, something virtually unseen in other animals. The presence of grandparents and extended kin is an exceptional feature of human societies. Indeed, if we lived longer, we would likely see great-grandparents and beyond as integral parts of the family unit. However, it makes little evolutionary sense that an ape?our evolutionary ancestor?would be naturally selected for such deep devotion to its cultural ancestors, their signs, symbols, and abstract ideas.?

A more plausible explanation is that human culture has less to do with learning by innocent animals and far more to do with teaching them. Humans have an aptitude for learning, and we are keen to observe and imitate, but this is a consequence of human domestication and teaching. What we learn is often irrelevant to the survival and reproductive needs of the organism, just as food and sex are irrelevant when you are not hungry or fertile. As members of a society, we have to learn abstract ideas, rituals, moral codes and gratitude to the dead.

Conclusion

Life is hard. It is always comforting to imagine that our children desire to eat whenever we want them to; or that they ?go to school? to ?learn?, when they are in fact taken there by us so that they may be taught. In the past, the idea that parents forcibly teach or feed their children would not be controversial because these behaviours were regarded as necessary, even morally good. The prevailing view of human uniqueness then was centred around spirituality. However, there is clearly a sense in which the current materialistic focus on animal culture remains spiritual, a projection of human ideals onto nature.

?

Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press.

Henrich, J. (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton University Press.

Mesoudi, A. (2011). Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences. University of Chicago Press.

Who Domesticated Humans?

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.

A prehistoric human seated closely among four attentive wolf-like dogs in a natural landscape, evoking the origins of animal domestication.

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 relying on evolved repsonses. 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.