Self-Domestication: From Analogy to Homology via Genomics

This paper seeks to clarify central aspects of the “self-domestication” hypothesis and its implications for the evolution of our species. It does so by reconstructing the evolutionary trajectory of the intuition at the heart of the hypothesis, showing what the hypothesis is not, and then proceeding to a critical review of the molecular mechanisms that have been suggested to underlie domestication processes. We propose a pre-domestication phase which can solve several lines of criticism around (self)-domestication, schematically outline the most parsimonious set of events that could have led to domestication in our lineage, and highlight specific genes within this framework, that can serve as regulatory hubs for experimental testing of human evolution in physiologically relevant models that recapitulate the key cellular lineages involved. Crucially, we show how (ancient) genomics can help us go beyond analogies and make the original intuition behind “self-domestication” stronger.