Book Review: Domesticated

Domesticated:Evolution in a Man-Made World

by Richard C. Francis

W.W. Norton, 2015

Richard Francis, in his refreshingly comprehensive new book Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, gives pride of place in his overview of humanity's steady adaptive impression on the animal kingdom to dogs, devoting his first chapters to the slow, still-murky process by which early man shaped wolves into tamed canines, proto-dogs that helped their human benefactors in ways that persist today:

Their superior olfactory and auditory senses came to function as early warning systems. It is significant that dogs don't need to be domesticated much to fulfill this function. Indeed, feral village or pariah dogs continue to serve as inadvertent warning signals throughout much of the world to this day.

The dynamics of those early years of the wolf-human relationship has been the subject of a great deal of interesting writing (including Pat Shipman's recent book positing a far earlier and far more survival-crucial teaming than has generally been envisioned), and given the fact that cooperation with canines gave early humans some of the distinct evolutionary advantages that allowed for the subsequent domestication of all the other animals Francis looks at in the course of his book, from pigs and horses to cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and even reindeer.

Dogs leant their superior senses to the paltry hearing and sight of humans; they leant their superior strength and endurance to the naked weakness of humans; they leant their seamless cooperative pack-structure to vital tasks like warning when danger approaches or (as Shipman speculated) guarding fresh kills from opportunistic predators. In other words, the irreplaceable cooperation of canines allowed humans to take a much larger place in the natural pecking order – and eventually take other species as additional servants. Francis portrays it as a keystone alliance, and he stresses the initial unlikely nature of the thing itself:

What makes this amazing evolutionary story even more remarkable is that for many thousands of years, all wolf-human interactions were overtly hostile. We competed fiercely for the same prey and probably killed each other at every opportunity. In this respect dogs are unique among domesticated animals. Their evolution by domestication represents, in many ways, a reversal of eons of prior evolution by natural selection.

That innovative process – the steady, intentional reversal of the forces of natural selection, or rather, humanity's subsuming of the role of natural selection, shaping and directing the lives of client animals straight into the “anthropocene,” the modern era in which human overpopulation and human technology have re-shaped the entire world. In that anthropocene, the handful of species domesticated by humans may win the Pyrrhic victory of outliving their wild brethren at the cost of their own freedom.

Francis writes all this in clear, strong prose that smooths out abstruse technical concepts and makes for deeply interesting reading throughout. Readers curious to know the full and latest thinking about the strong hand humanity has exercised over the rest of the animal kingdom need look no further than this book.