Are humans a self-domesticated species?

What do scientists mean by self-domestication? #

Domesticated animals, from dogs to cattle to silver foxes bred for tameness, tend to share a set of changes. They are less quick to attack, and they often have shorter faces, smaller teeth, more youthful features and smaller brains than their wild relatives. Some scientists have noticed that humans show a similar pattern when compared with our earlier ancestors. Since no other species tamed us, the suggestion is that we did it to ourselves, hence ‘self-domestication’.

The idea is strongly linked with Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and a specialist in chimpanzees. In his book The Goodness Paradox (2019) he uses “domesticated” to mean “tamed as a result of genetic adaptation”, not tamed within one lifetime.¹ Bonobos are his clearest example of an animal that tamed itself without any help from humans. They are less aggressive than their close cousins the chimpanzees, especially the males, and “The case for bonobos’ being self-domesticated could hardly be stronger.”²

What is the goodness paradox? #

That humans are both very peaceful and very violent. Wrangham separates two kinds of aggression. Reactive aggression is the hot, impulsive kind, such as losing your temper or lashing out. Proactive aggression is cold and planned. Within their own groups, humans fight far less than chimpanzees do; he writes that physical aggression in humans happens at “less than 1 per cent” of the rate seen in our closest ape relatives. Yet humans are also capable of planned, organised violence on a scale no other animal approaches. His answer is that we became low in the first kind and stayed high in the second.³

How does Wrangham think it happened? #

Through equality, enforced. Among our early ancestors, he suggests, a bully who tried to dominate everyone could be stopped once others were able to plan together, which language made possible. Over many generations, the most aggressive would-be tyrants were removed, sometimes by being killed, and so the genes for hot-headed aggression became rarer. He places the start of this “certainly by 200,000 years ago, and possibly with the first glimmerings of Homo sapiens”, long before anyone farmed.⁴

Here Wrangham builds on the cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm, whose work on hunter-gatherer equality is already part of Therapeutic Shamanism. In Boehm’s ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’, the group comes together to resist anyone trying to dominate, first by teasing, then ridicule and shaming, then simply refusing to cooperate, and finally by casting the person out. As a last resort, “any tribal member who persisted in trying to dominate would have been killed to protect the tribe.”⁵ Wrangham takes this one step further, asking what thousands of generations of such levelling would do to human nature itself. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?

Do all scientists agree? #

No, and the debate is still open. Dor Shilton, Eva Jablonka and their colleagues think that human social life looks more like that of other cooperative mammals than like that of domesticated animals, and that what changed was our ability to control our emotions socially, not simply a reduction in aggression. They think calling it “domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this” is misleading, and point out that the word has an uncomfortable history, having once been used in racist and eugenic arguments.⁶ Others question whether the ‘domestication syndrome’ of physical traits is one thing at all. Wrangham himself accepts that some of his evidence is uncertain.

There is also disagreement about timing. Wrangham places the change at the beginnings of our species. The psychologist Bruce Hood, in The Domesticated Brain (2014), suggests that it may have sped up after the last Ice Age, when people began living together in larger settled groups, and sees that as progress.⁷ The archaeologist Helen Leach, who argued in 2003 that human bones show the ‘domestication syndrome’, linked it with settled life over the last ten thousand years or so. That is the version closest in timing to Therapeutic Shamanism’s own, and Wrangham rejects it.

What does Therapeutic Shamanism mean by domestication? #

Something different, though related. In Therapeutic Shamanism, domestication is what happened to us when we took up farming, from around 11,000 BC, and it accelerated with the rise of the first city-states, from around 4,000 BC, the period called the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. “It is not just other animals and plants that we domesticated in turning to totalitarian agriculture, but ourselves as well. We are a self-domesticated animal.”⁸

The reasons it gives are about how we live, not about genes. Hunter-gatherers lived in small groups of up to around 150 people, the size human brains seem built for, with much free time and personal freedom. Farming brought hard labour, settlement, and communities far larger than “those we were hard-wired for”, which needed laws, rules and control to hold them together. “The result was we turned ourselves from wild and free hunter-gatherers, into domesticated and tamed beings.” And: “Civilisation is all about control. Control over nature, of course, but also control over our own human inner nature.”⁹

Put simply, “in order to practice agriculture, there was one species we had to domesticate more than any other. That species is, of course, ourselves.”¹⁰ See What does domestication do to us? and What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?

Do the two ideas fit together? #

In places. Both say that human beings have tamed themselves, and both give equality a central place in how hunter-gatherer tribes lived. The levelling that Wrangham thinks shaped our genes is the same levelling that Therapeutic Shamanism sees as the healthy way hunter-gatherer tribes kept power in check.

There were also very early “seeds” of domestication long before farming. Social animals “slowly but surely open a gap between their true nature and what they need to be, or choose to be, in order to fit in.” This is “the very beginning of domestication”, though “not domestication as we know it, as these are still wild animals.”¹¹

The differences matter, though. For Wrangham, self-domestication made us better at living together, and he sees it as part of how we became human. For Therapeutic Shamanism, the domestication that began with farming is mostly a loss, of freedom, of our wild and authentic selves, and of our relationship with the living world. It is also cultural, and so open to change: “The violence and destructiveness of the modern, Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer era is cultural, not innate.”¹²

Therapeutic Shamanism also asks whether what passes for normal today may itself be a product of domestication. What if, instead, we are neurowild, and what passes for normal is neurodomesticated, or neurotamed? See Is neurotypical the same as the Domesticated Mind?

Can domestication be undone? #

Not the genetic kind, if Wrangham is right. The cultural kind is a different matter. Therapeutic Shamanism calls the healing of it rewildingRewilding. Recovering the wild, undomesticated Soul: the practical healing work that follows from the Fall diagnosis. We cannot go back, only forward: ancient wisdom for future solutions. Read the full answer, which means recovering the wild, authentic self and an animist relationship with the rest of the living world. It does not mean returning to a hunter-gatherer life; there are now far too many of us for that: “We simply cannot go back. Instead, we have to find a way forward.”¹³ See Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?