Browsing by Author "Spengler, Robert N."
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- Seeking consensus on the domestication conceptPublication . Spengler, Robert N.; Tang, Li; Corso, Marta Dal; Gillis, Rosalind Emma; Oliveira, Hugo; Makhamad, Basira MirThe domestication of plants and animals permitted the development of cities and social hierarchies, as well as fostering cultural changes that ultimately led humanity into the modern world. Despite the importance of this set of related evolutionary phenomena, scholars have not reached a consensus on what the earliest steps in the domestication process looked like, how long the seminal portions of the process took to unfold, or whether humans played a conscious role in parts or all of it. Likewise, many scholars find it difficult to disentangle the cultural processes of cultivation from the biological processes of domestication. Over the past decade, the prevailing views among scholars have begun to shift towards unconscious and protracted models of early domestication; however, the nomenclature used to discuss these changes has been stagnant. Discussions of early domestication remain bound up in prevailing definitions and preconceived ideas of what the process looked like. In this paper, we seek to break down definitions of domestication and to construct a definition that serves equal utility regardless of the views that researchers hold about the process. This article is part of the theme issue 'Unravelling domestication: multi-disciplinary perspectives on human and non-human relationships in the past, present and future'.
- Unravelling domestication: introduction to the theme issuePublication . Gillis, Rosalind; Corso, Marta Dal; Oliveira, Hugo; Spengler, Robert N.The domestication of plants and animals is considered one of the key milestones of cultural evolution, on a par with the use of lithic technology and mastery of fire. Domesticated species are—and have been—fundamental to the growth and economic success of human societies. Millennia of herding and agricultural intensification have caused irreversible changes to natural environments, while the ability to accrue and control food surpluses has been linked with the development of complex societies as well as the exacerbation of socioeconomic inequalities. From the mid-Holocene onwards, domesticated plants and animals became integral to the maintenance of human populations and their social orders across a range of contrasting environments. In a few cases, this form of economic production stretches back to the Pleistocene–Hol ocene transition. The intensification of agricultural systems has led to a series of demographic expansion waves that traversed the globe, and ultimately resulted in the congregation of densely clustered populations [1,2].