Archaeology has a long history of looking to evolutionary biology for ways to explain the initial domestication of plants and animals. To date, most have been firmly grounded in traditional neo-Darwinian principles. These characterize domestication as an adaptive response to declining resource availability in which human goal-directed behavior plays little if any role. Recently, many of us have begun to look to niche-construction theory (NCT) as an alternative framework that achieves a much better fit with the empirical record of initial domestication in multiple world areas and also aligns with our recognition of the importance of human agency and goal-directed behaviors in evolution1,2. As archaeologists have become more familiar with the NCT literature, and the broader EES framework of which NCT is a part, we have recognized that we, in turn, have something to offer evolutionary biologists. One of the major challenges to the EES is to demonstrate that it can generate empirically testable, novel predictions about evolutionary processes3. The initial domestication of plants and animals, we argue, may help address this challenge. Indeed, we believe it answers Schlichting and Wund’s4 call for a gold standard ‘single system’ combining multiple interacting constructive processes and inheritance systems that can be used to comprehend complex evolutionary processes. Moreover, the increasingly robust archaeological, archaeobiological, and genetic (modern and ancient) data on initial domestication in multiple world areas makes it an especially tractable system for evaluating EES predictions.
