Does Palaeolithic Resource Management Leading to Domestication Explain Human “Modernity”?

Domestication involves the close co-existence of two different organisms, with at least one subjected to artificial selection. Humans domesticated numerous plants and animals. It is said that domestication by humans is a gradual process, starting with managing some aspects of other organisms' existence and ending with control over their reproduction through selecting traits that meet human needs. This selection results in a “domestication syndrome” that produces altered behaviour, anatomy, and physiology in domesticates (e.g., tameness, smaller brains, longer lactation in animals, and differing size and properties of fruits and whole organisms in plants). Archaeologically documented human domesticates date back to the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene (around 12,000 years ago). However, signs of changes in human populations indicating changing methods of exploiting environmental resources date back to the transition from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Upper Palaeolithic (about 50-40 thousand years ago). At this time, there is also a shift in human characteristics, indicating self-domestication (reduction in cranial capacity, gracilisation of the body, neotenisation). This paper discusses the possibility that human self-domestication was linked to the management of large mammals during the Late Pleistocene, being an initial step towards domestication. However, this idea lacks firm support based on the available archaeological evidence.