Central questions in the domestication of plants and animals

Along with symbolic communication, tool use, and bipedalism, the domestication of plants and animals, together with the associated emergence of agriculture, stands as one of the pivotal thresholds in human evolution. For more than a hundred years researchers have wrestled with the questions of what domestication is, how it is detected, and why it happened. The past decade in particular has witnessed a remarkable acceleration of interest in domestication, thanks to advances in our ability to detect the context, timing, and process of domestication in a wide array of different plant and animal species around the world.(1) This review focuses on overarching issues of defining, documenting, and explaining the domestication of plants and animals, tracing a path through often discordant viewpoints to offer some new perspectives.