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Francis argues that domestication has played a huge role in the evolution and survival of species. It has benefitted animals such as cats, dogs, pigs, cattle, sheep, horses etc (all of which get their own individual chapters in the book) in that they have thrived while many of their wild ancestors have died out, and it has benefitted humans by enabling us to settle, multiply and control.
An innate tameness was the key characteristic that allowed domestication to develop. Francis looks in detail at the changes – genetic, behavioural and morphological – that human intervention brought about in the domesticated species. He does so by combining history, archaeology and anthropology with up-to-date ideas on genetics and evolutionary developmental biology. His final three chapters on humans attribute our success not just to intelligence but to our “hypersociality and unprecedented capacity for cooperative behaviour”.
One of the book’s most striking conclusions is that evolution is still fundamentally conservative, despite the extent of human intervention; this is especially noticeable in the case of the widespread breeding that dogs have undergone.
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