And so he hypothesized that the early stages of all animal domestication events involved choosing the calmest, most prosocial-toward-human animals: I will refer to this trait as tameness, though that term is used in many different ways in the literature. We can’t have our domesticates-to-be trying to bite our heads off. Why? Belyaev hypothesized that the one thing our ancestors always needed in a species they were domesticating was an animal that interacted prosocially with humans.
Our ancestors had domesticated species for a plethora of reasons-including transportation (e.g., horses), food (e.g., cattle) and protection (e.g., dogs)-yet regardless of what they were selected for, domesticated species, over time, begin to display traits in the domestication syndrome. Today this suite of traits is known as the domestication syndrome. After he graduated he fought in World War II, and subsequently landed a job at the Institute for Fur Breeding Animals in Moscow.īoth as a result of his reading of Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (Darwin 1868), and his interaction with domesticated animals at the Ivanova Agricultural Academy and at the Institute for Fur Breeding Animals, Belyaev knew that many domesticated species share a suite of characteristics including floppy ears, short, curly tails, juvenilized facial and body features, reduced stress hormone levels, mottled fur, and relatively long reproductive seasons. In the late 1930s Belyaev was a student at the Ivanova Agricultural Academy in Moscow. It began with a Russian geneticist named Dmitri Belyaev. All of this is the result of what is known as the silver fox, or farm fox, domestication study. Today the domesticated foxes at an experimental farm near the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia are inherently as calm as any lapdog.
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