Farm animals look different from their wild counterparts in many ways, and one difference is consistent: their brains are smaller than those of their ancestors. From sheep to pigs to cows, ...

New research transforms our understanding of the circumstances and timing of the domestication of chickens, their spread across Asia into the west, and reveals the changing way in which they were ...

There is a good reason why so many humans refer to dogs as man’s best friend. Humans domesticated dogs more than 11,000 years ago, before we even invented agriculture. Today dogs are popular as pets ...

Bones from the turn of the Holocene indicate that humans were feeding canines—including wolves and coyotes—fish over 10,000 years ago, Reading time 3 minutes Who let the dogs out? It remains unclear, ...

Wild boars and red junglefowl gave rise to common pigs and chickens. These animals' genes evolved to express themselves differently, leading to signatures of domestication -- such as weaker bones and ...

Though dogs are so close genetically to wolves that many taxonomists consider them to be a subspecies, most people wouldn’t let a wolf lick their hand as readily as a Shih Tzu. When animals are ...

Domestic cats have shared our homes for millennia, but their origins remain mysterious. Two recent studies propose a new lead regarding their domestication. Researchers already knew that domestic cats ...

"The first modern scholarly synthesis of animal domestication Across the globe and at different times in the past millennia, the evolutionary history of domesticated animals has been greatly affected ...

The ancient peoples of Latin America did us all a tremendous favor by saving avocados from extinction and gradually making them tastier over thousands of years of domestication. (Credit: Markus via ...