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Abstract
The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that, like mammalian domesticates, humans have gone through a process of selection against aggression – a process that in the case of humans was self-induced. Here, we extend previous proposals and suggest that what underlies human social evolution is selection for socially mediated emotional control and plasticity. In the first part of the paper we highlight general features of human social evolution, which, we argue, is more similar to that of other social mammals than to that of mammalian domesticates and is therefore incompatible with the notion of human self-domestication. In the second part, we discuss the unique aspects of human evolution and propose that emotional control and social motivation in humans evolved during two major, partially overlapping stages. The first stage, which followed the emergence of mimetic communication, the beginnings of musical engagement, and mimesis-related cognition, required socially mediated emotional plasticity and was accompanied by new social emotions. The second stage followed the emergence of language, when individuals began to instruct the imagination of their interlocutors, and to rely even more extensively on emotional plasticity and culturally learned emotional control. This account further illustrates the significant differences between humans and domesticates, thus challenging the notion of human self-domestication.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Evolutionary Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in PsychologyReceived: 15 October 2019 Accepted: 17 January 2020 Published: 14 February 2020Citation: Shilton D, Breski M, Dor D and Jablonka E (2020) Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control? Front
It was Darwin who first critically discussed self-domestication from an evolutionary perspective. While he conceded that humans are similar to domesticates in exhibiting extreme phenotypic variability, he argued that the term domestication would be misapplied in the case of human evolution: “It is, an error to speak of man, even if we look only to the conditions to which he has been exposed, as ‘far more domesticated’ [. . . ] man differs widely from any strictly domesticated animal; for his breeding has never long been controlled, either by methodical or unconscious selection
Our approach differs from these accounts by (1) focusing on earlier hominin evolution, beginning with Homo erectus, when most human-specific cooperative and morphological traits seem to have already evolved; (2) suggesting that human social evolution is more similar to the evolution of pro-social behavior in other highly social mammals, which is associated with increased sophistication of social structures and increased cognitive and emotional plasticity; and (3) emphasizing the unique social-cultural selective environment of humans, which, we argue, shaped and amplified our species’ cognitive and affective plasticity
Summary
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Evolutionary Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. These include more stable parties, extended female sexual receptivity and a much less significant reduction in relative brain size (when compared to species domesticated by humans) This raises the question of whether this complex suite of physiological traits and social behaviors is best described as an outcome of a “self-domestication” process, rather than as the outcome of selection for cooperation and emotional control that is observed in many other highly social mammals. Our approach differs from these accounts by (1) focusing on earlier hominin evolution, beginning with Homo erectus, when most human-specific cooperative and morphological traits seem to have already evolved; (2) suggesting that human social evolution is more similar to the evolution of pro-social behavior in other highly social mammals, which is associated with increased sophistication of social structures and increased cognitive and emotional plasticity; and (3) emphasizing the unique social-cultural selective environment of humans, which, we argue, shaped and amplified our species’ cognitive and affective plasticity. The recent evolution of humans, especially after the split with Neanderthals, is interpreted as the outcome of intense cultural evolution driven by language, musicking and other cultural strategies (Heyes, 2018), rather than by selection against aggression
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