Domestication means taming wild animals or plants so that they can live and work with humans, like turning a wild wolf into a friendly dog or making wild plants like wheat grow in fields.
Full definition
And seen in this way I regret the process of
domestication of the «wild ones» that sets in now and promotes so much homelessness.»
«There are maybe 10 genes, or 50, or hundreds involved
in domestication syndrome,» says Carlos Driscoll, chair of conservation genetics at the Wildlife Institute of India of the National Institutes of Health.
The origin of
dog domestication in Europe with Robert Wayne; Richard Lenski tracks the adaptation of bacteria over 50,000 generations; Robert Services describes the prospects of a new contender in solar technology.
«Reduction of genetic diversity by factitious bottleneck is one of the key aspects in
domestication process.
The new information about when turkeys were domesticated helps amplify the bigger picture of
animal domestication in Mesoamerica.
These «selective sweeps» underlie the sweeter and less sour fruit uniformly selected by humans
during domestication of the tree.
Remains from Kazakhstan's more than 5,000 - year - old Botai culture have yielded the earliest direct evidence
for domestication of these versatile beasts, scientists report.
He and others have proposed that a group of cells involved in early development called the neural crest are responsible for the suite of traits associated with
domestication syndrome.
Moreover, he argues that diversity patterns in living dogs might not be a foolproof map of
domestication events in ancient times.
Instead, phylogenetic analysis shows Przewalski's horses are feral, descended from the earliest - known instance of
horse domestication by the Botai people of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago.
There have been a number of significant pandemics in human history, generally zoonoses that came about
with domestication of animals - such as influenza and tuberculosis.
But it's possible that they played a pivotal role, not just for dogs, but for other species as well, said Carlos Driscoll, a geneticist who studies
cat domestication at the National Institutes of Health in Rockville, Maryland.
The problem with much of the research
on domestication is that the focus has been on how dogs and wolves interact with humans.
Unlike dogs, who have undergone many physical changes
since domestication and evolved to survive on an omnivorous diet, cats haven't changed much, and still require a high - protein diet.
«The gelada case is comparable to what
early domestication of dogs might have been like,» study researcher Claudio Sillero, of the University of Oxford, told New Scientist's Bob Holmes.
«Turkeys would have made a good choice for
domestication as there were not many other animals of suitable temperament available and turkeys would have been drawn to human settlements searching for scraps»
This allowed us to pinpoint the genetic changes that have occurred during
rabbit domestication, says SciLifeLab faculty member Leif Andersson.
Many of our ideas
about domestication derive from Charles Darwin, whose ideas in turn were strongly influenced by British animal - breeding practices during the 19th century, a period when landowners vigorously pursued systematic livestock improvement.
The results of a second study suggest that soon
after domestication dogs began accompanying humans on long journeys.
The research, says Lindholm, provides a window into
how domestication started for mice.
For example, it's thought that the capacity of dogs to perceive information from humans is the result of changes to the brain from becoming a companion animal
through domestication.
If you haven't already, check out my guest post over at Attempts
At Domestication on my reupholstering our dining room chairs.
In their natural state, un-confused by
human domestication, it is the environment which controls this ordered response in all life below mankind.
Geneticist Leif Andersson of Uppsala University in Sweden agrees that genetic data can't prove rabbit
domestication happened around 600.
The depth and diversity of that tree suggest that the process of
domestication took place over a widespread area and a long period of time — and it's no accident that the timing coincides with the emergence of agriculture.
An additional selection, at least for social attentiveness and tolerance, was not necessary during
canine domestication.
«People have made guesses about
turkey domestication based on the presence or absence of bones at archaeological sites, but now we are bringing in classes of information that were not available before.
Rice domestication revealed by reduced shattering of archaeological rice from the lower Yangtze valley.
No written records predate the arrival of Spanish explorers in the Americas, but the earliest archaeological evidence for maize
domestication dates back around 8,700 years.
Finally, the researchers developed a novel statistical method to investigate the genome data for signatures of positive selection in early
domestication stages.
«The message here is that there's no [single]
domestication gene,» says Peter Andolfatto, an evolutionary geneticist at Princeton University.
Recent genetic evidence suggests that
maize domestication occurred 9000 years ago in central Mexico.
With a similar sleight of hand, others insert archaeology into the debate, so that the Anthropocene can be traced to the
first domestication of plants and animals some 10,000 years ago.
Charles Darwin wrote of polydactyl cats in his book «The Variation of Animals and Plants
Under Domestication» published in the 1850's «I have heard of several families of six - toed cats, in one of which the peculiarity had been transmitted for at least three generations» pre-dating claims elsewhere that the first scientific recording of feline polydactyly was in 1868.
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.
3D morphometric analysis of fossil canid skulls contradicts the
suggested domestication of dogs during the late Paleolithic.
They then identified the putative causal mutations in genes controlling shattering (a key
domestication trait among cereal crops).
«It's still unclear, however, whether the Egyptian domestic cat descends from cats imported from the Near East or whether a separate,
second domestication took place in Egypt,» says researcher Claudio Ottoni.
«I expected to catch evolution red - handed,
when domestication first started,» Orlando recalls.
Phrases with «domestication»