Instructor: Joy Shokeir

Animal domestication irrevocably altered life on our planet, producing a morphological and behavioural suite of characteristics—tameness, fecundity, and neoteny—known as “domestication syndrome”. Once introduced into the Domus, domesticated animals divided the domesticated world from the wilderness, revolutionized ecologies, and laid the foundations of civilizations. Looking beyond dogs as the first domesticated species, human evolution itself bears the marks of domestication in our neotenous skulls and tamed behaviour, making us the product of the “zeroth” domestication. Throughout this course, we will critically examine how domestication has shaped the bodies and lives of human and non-human animals from the Paleolithic to Modernity.