[marginalium]
Self-Domesticated Ape
4 Mar 2025
We are the only self-domesticated animal:
Although wolves were domesticated into dogs in several regions of the world around 15 to 40 thousand years ago, they were not the first animals to be domesticated. We were. Homo sapiens may have been the first species to select for these genes. When anthropologists compare the morphological features of modern humans to our immediate ancestors like the Neanderthal and Denisovans, humans display neoteny. Humans resemble juvenile Neanderthal, with rounder falter faces, shorter jaws with smaller teeth, and slender bones. And in fact the differences between a modern human skull and a Neanderthal skull parallel those between a dog and its wild wolf ancestor.
The follow on exploring that idea was interesting, then it got cute, in a way I enjoyed:
Our self-domestication is just the start of our humanity. We are self-domesticated apes, but more important, we are apes that have invented ourselves … We invented our humanity. We invented cooking, we invented human language, we invented our sense of fairness, duty, and responsibility. All these came intentionally, out our imaginations of what could be … We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention … And we are not done inventing ourselves yet.
Fun.
Anthologies: Betterment, Gratification, Somatic Architecture, On the Nature of Things, Humans Aren't Special, Accidental Civilisation