Domestication is a multi-generational mutualistic relationship in which an animal species, such as humans or leafcutter ants, takes over control and care of another species, such as sheep or fungi, to obtain from them a steady supply of resources, such as meat, milk, or labor. The process is gradual and geographically diffuse, based on trial and error. Domestication affects genes for behavior in animals, making them less aggressive. In plants, domestication affects genes for morphology, such as increasing seed size and stopping the shattering of cereal seedheads. Such changes both make domesticated organisms easier to handle and reduce their ability to survive in the wild.
Terrestrial vertebrates are the first animals to be domesticated by humans, with the earliest domestication of vertebrates being the domestication of dogs from wolves, who diverged from their wild relatives and developed a commensal relationship with Upper Paleolithic/Mesolithic humans at least 15,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene. Other animals, including goats, sheep, and cows, were domesticated around 11,000 years ago. Among birds, the chicken was first domesticated in East Asia at least 3,250 years ago. The horse came under domestication around 5,500 years ago in central Asia as a riding animal. For aquatic vertebrates (fish), the Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in southwestern Victoria, Australia may have raised short-finned eels as early as about 4,580 BCE, See also attached documents: National Heritage List Location and Boundary Map, and Government Gazette, 20 July 2004.Aborigines may have farmed eels, built huts ABC Science News, 13 March 2003.Lake Condah Sustainability Project . Retrieved 18 February 2010. and the local Budj Bim Cultural Landscape (a World Heritage Site) is one of the oldest known aquaculture sites in the world. Common carp were cultivated in Ancient China as early as 2000–2100 BCE (around 4,000 years BP) as per oral tradition, and the earliest written evidence lies in a Spring and Autumn period monograph by Fan Li called The Classic of Fish Culture, written around 475 BCE ( BP). Circumstantial evidence from the Jiahu archaeological site from prehistoric China also speculated possible aquaculture locations dating from 6200 BCE (about 8,200 years BP), where trapped carp were fed with nymphs and silkworm faeces. Among invertebrates, the silkworm and the western honey bee were domesticated over 5,000 years ago for silk and honey, respectively. The branch of agriculture concerning domesticated animals are known collectively as animal husbandry.
The domestication of plants began around 13,000–11,000 years ago with cereals such as wheat and barley in the Middle East, alongside crops such as lentil, pea, chickpea, and flax. Beginning around 10,000 years ago, Indigenous peoples in the Americas began to cultivate peanuts, squash, maize, potatoes, cotton, and cassava. Rice was first domesticated in China some 9,000 years ago. In Africa, crops such as sorghum were domesticated. Agriculture developed in some 13 centres around the world, domesticating different crops and animals.
Three groups of insects, namely ambrosia beetles, leafcutter ants, and fungus-growing termites have independently domesticated species of fungi, on which they feed. In the case of the termites, the relationship is a fully obligate symbiosis on both sides.
Definitions
Domestication (not to be confused with the taming of an individual animal), is from the Latin , 'belonging to the house'. The term remained loosely defined until the 21st century, when the American archaeologist Melinda A. Zeder defined it as a long-term relationship in which humans take over control and care of another organism to gain a predictable supply of a resource, resulting in mutual benefits. She noted further that it is not synonymous with agriculture since agriculture depends on domesticated organisms but does not automatically result from domestication.
Michael D. Purugganan notes that domestication has been hard to define, despite the "instinctual consensus" that it means "the plants and animals found under the care of humans that provide us with benefits and which have evolved under our control." In 2025, Kathryn Lord and colleagues proposed a new panspecies definition for domestication by humans, namely "evolution ... in response to an anthropogenic niche". It is the process by which a nonhuman population adapts to an environment created through human activity. Furthermore, "the term 'domestic' should refer solely to those populations that are obligate synanthropes and have adapted to an anthropogenic environment to the extent that only sink populations (in which the death rate is higher than the birth rate) exist outside of that niche."
Domestication syndrome is the suite of phenotypic traits that arose during the initial domestication process and which distinguish domesticated species including crops from their wild ancestors. It can also mean a set of differences now observed in domesticated mammals, not necessarily reflecting the initial domestication process. The changes in mammals include increased docility and tameness, coat coloration, reductions in tooth size, craniofacial morphology, ear and tail form (e.g., floppy ears), estrus cycles, levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone and neurotransmitters, prolongations in juvenile behavior, and reductions in brain size and of particular brain regions.
Purugganan comments that insects such as termites, ambrosia beetles, and leafcutter ants have domesticated some species of fungi, and notes further that other groups such as weeds and commensals have wrongly been called domesticated. Starting from Zeder's definition, Purugganan proposes a "broad" definition: "a coevolutionary process that arises from a mutualism, in which one species (the domesticator) constructs an environment where it actively manages both the survival and reproduction of another species (the domesticate) in order to provide the former with resources and/or services." He comments that this adds niche construction to the activities of the domesticator.
Cause and timing
The domestication of animals and plants by humans was triggered by the climatic and environmental changes that occurred after the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum and which continue to this present day. These changes made obtaining food by hunting and gathering difficult. The first animal to be domesticated was the dog at least 15,000 years ago. The Younger Dryas 12,900 years ago was a period of intense cold and aridity that put pressure on humans to intensify their foraging strategies but did not favour agriculture. By the beginning of the Holocene 11,700 years ago, a warmer climate and increasing human populations led to small-scale animal and plant domestication and an increased supply of food.
+ Timeline of some major domestication events Event Centre of origin Purpose Date/years ago Foraging for wild grains Asia Food > 23,000 Dog Eurasia Commensal > 15,000 Wheat, Barley Near East Food 13,000–11,000 Flax Near East Textiles 13,000–11,000CannabisEast AsiaTextiles12,000 Goat, Sheep, Pig, Cow Near East, South Asia Food 11,000–10,000 Rice China Food 9,000 Horse Central Asia Draft, riding 5,500 Honey bee Ancient Egypt Honey > 5,000 Chicken East Asia Food 3,250
The appearance of the domestic dog in the archaeological record, at least 15,000 years ago, was followed by domestication of livestock and of crops such as wheat and barley, the invention of agriculture, and the transition of humans from foraging to farming in different places and times across the planet. For instance, small-scale trial cultivation of cereals began some 23,000 years ago at the Ohalo II site in Israel.
In the Fertile Crescent 11,000–10,000 years ago, zooarchaeology indicates that goats, pigs, sheep, and taurine cattle were the first livestock to be domesticated. Two thousand years later, humped zebu cattle were domesticated in what is today Baluchistan in Pakistan. In East Asia 8,000 years ago, pigs were domesticated from wild boar genetically different from those found in the Fertile Crescent. The cat was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, perhaps 10,000 years ago, from African wildcats, possibly to control rodents that were damaging stored food.
Animals
Desirable traits
The domestication of vertebrate animals is the relationship between non-human vertebrates and humans who have an influence on their care and reproduction. In his 1868 book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Charles Darwin recognized the small number of traits that made domestic species different from their wild ancestors. He was also the first to recognize the difference between conscious selective breeding in which humans directly select for desirable traits and unconscious selection, in which traits evolve as a by-product of natural selection or from selection on other traits.
There is a difference between domestic and wild populations; some of these differences constitute the domestication syndrome, traits presumed essential in the early stages of domestication, while others represent later improvement traits. Domesticated mammals in particular tend to be smaller and less aggressive than their wild counterparts; other common traits are floppy ears, a smaller brain, and a shorter muzzle. Domestication traits are generally fixed within all domesticates, and were selected during the initial episode of domestication of that animal or plant, whereas improvement traits are present only in a proportion of domesticates, though they may be fixed in individual breeds or regional populations.
Certain animal species, and certain individuals within those species, make better candidates for domestication because of their behavioral characteristics:
The size and organization of their social structure The availability and the degree of selectivity in their choice of mates The ease and speed with which the parents bond with their young, and the maturity and mobility of the young at birth The degree of flexibility in diet and habitat tolerance Responses to humans and new environments, including reduced flight response and reactivity to external stimuli.
Mammals
The beginnings of mammal domestication involved a protracted coevolutionary process with multiple stages along different pathways. There are three proposed major pathways that most mammal domesticates followed into domestication:
commensals, adapted to a human niche (e.g., dogs, cats, possibly pigs) prey animals sought for food (e.g., sheep, goats, cattle, water buffalo, yak, pig, reindeer, llama and alpaca) animals targeted for draft and riding (e.g., horse, donkey, camel).
Humans did not intend to domesticate mammals from either the commensal or prey pathways, or at least they did not envision a domesticated animal would result from it. In both of those cases, humans became entangled with these species as the relationship between them intensified, and humans' role in their survival and reproduction gradually led to formalized animal husbandry. Although the directed pathway for draft and riding animals proceeded from capture to taming, the other two pathways are not as goal-oriented, and archaeological records suggest that they took place over much longer time frames.
Unlike other domestic species selected primarily for production-related traits, dogs were initially selected for their behaviors. The dog was domesticated long before other animals, becoming established across Eurasia before the end of the Late Pleistocene era, well before agriculture.