INAUGURAL ARTICLE by a Recently Elected Academy Member:Core questions in domestication research

The domestication of plants and animals is a key transition in human history, and its profound and continuing impacts are the focus of a broad range of transdisciplinary research spanning the physical, biological, and social sciences. Three central aspects of domestication that cut across and unify this diverse array of research perspectives are addressed here. Domestication is defined as a distinctive coevolutionary, mutualistic relationship between domesticator and domesticate and distinguished from related but ultimately different processes of resource management and agriculture. The relative utility of genetic, phenotypic, plastic, and contextual markers of evolving domesticatory relationships is discussed. Causal factors are considered, and two leading explanatory frameworks for initial domestication of plants and animals, one grounded in optimal foraging theory and the other in niche-construction theory, are compared.The domestication of plants and animals marks a major evolutionary transition in human history—one with profound and lasting global impacts. The origins of domestication—when and where, how, and why our ancestors targeted plant and animal species for domestication—is an enduring and increasingly active area of scientific inquiry for researchers from many different disciplines. Enhancing present-day productivity of long-standing and recently domesticated species and exploring social and biological issues surrounding their role in feeding rapidly expanding global populations are topics of pressing concern. The volume and breadth of domestication research is underscored by a keyword search on the term “domestication” for the year 2013 which yielded a total of 811 papers in more than 350 different journals (Table S1), including 42 articles published in PNAS (Table S2).Given the large and growing number of studies on domestication across a wide array of disciplines, it is worthwhile to address three central questions. (i) Is there a definition of domestication applicable to both plants and animals from the distant past to present day that distinguishes domestication from related processes of resource management and agriculture? (ii) How does domestication change both the domesticate and domesticator, and how can we track these changes through time? (iii) Why did humans domesticate plants and animals, and are there common causal factors that underlie the process of domestication wherever it takes place?