Did humans domesticate themselves?
February 19, 2018, University of Barcelona
Human self-domestication posits that among the driving forces of human evolution, humans selected their companions depending on who exhibited more pro-social behavior. Researchers from a team of the UB led by Cedric Boeckx, ICREA professor at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics and member of the Institute of Complex Systems of the University of Barcelona (UBICS), report new genetic evidence for this evolutionary process.
The study, published in PLOS ONE, compared the genomes of modern humans to those of several domesticated species and their wild animal types in order to find overlapping genes associated with domestication traits, such as docility or a gracile physiognomy. The results showed a statistically significant number of genes associated with domestication, which overlapped between domestic animals and modern humans, but not with their wild equals, like Neanderthals.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-humans-domesticate.html#jCp
