Domesticate

Did humans domesticate plants, or did they domesticate us? While this provocative question might not be the way we learned about the history of agriculture in high school, it animates the current study of archaeology. What’s at stake is a matter of perspective—how we, as a species, see our place in nature and nature’s place in our own evolution. There are few places on Earth where this question is more present than Çatalhöyük, an about 9,000-year-old site in Turkey that was one of the places where agriculture was…

In the last decade, archaeologists have discovered evidence that foxes may have been kept as pets thousands of years ago—or, at the very least, tolerated to hang around human settlements.To learn more about the relationship between foxes and our ancestors, I spoke with an archaeologist and a zoologist about the latest scientific findings and what they mean for our understanding of animal domestication in human history.Fox burialsThe most recent study of archaeological burial sites where both foxes and humans were found…