Nice article! Even more interesting, ants also semi-domesticate other insects: protecting aphids, mealybugs or caterpillars from enemies so that they can collect the honeydew they secret. Ants not only protect their charges, but will carry them around to better feeding areas, and in the case of some caterpillars bring them into the colony nest at night to keep an eye on them.
One suspects that ants only just missed out on being the dominant species on the planet, and possibly they are in fact.
Aptly timed article as I have been on a humanity's origins kick lately. It's easy to credit farming and all the downstream results as due to human ingenuity. But as you point out, it's harder to make this case in light of the example of natural farmers like the leafcutters. I wonder if we can make a principled distinction between the kind of farming human's engage in, or engaged in at the dawn of farming, and the example of leafcutter behavior. Does the question of who domesticated who even make sense or is it just an empty semantic debate?
The obvious point is that we conceptualize farming and its effects and deliberately engage in the practice. But this almost certainly wasn't the case initially. What would early farming need to look like to decide that we were domesticated by wheat rather than vice versa? I think a potentially relevant distinction is whether we deliberately engaged in proto-farming behavior, or was the success of some subset of early humans due to non-deliberate behavior that happened to enable proto-farming? Then, did the success of the proto-farmers lead to genetic adaptations for this new lifestyle? I don't know if we can recover enough information from the past to weigh in on this. Maybe the archeological record can reveal the duration of the proto-farming stage with corresponding genetic adaptations. A short duration of the proto-farming stage would suggest to me deliberate behavior. A long duration, enough for genetic adaptation, would suggest non-deliberate behavior and thus human adaptation to wheat prior to deliberate cultivation.
Nice article! Even more interesting, ants also semi-domesticate other insects: protecting aphids, mealybugs or caterpillars from enemies so that they can collect the honeydew they secret. Ants not only protect their charges, but will carry them around to better feeding areas, and in the case of some caterpillars bring them into the colony nest at night to keep an eye on them.
One suspects that ants only just missed out on being the dominant species on the planet, and possibly they are in fact.
Ants are really interesting! https://dochammer.substack.com/p/ants-and-anima
Aptly timed article as I have been on a humanity's origins kick lately. It's easy to credit farming and all the downstream results as due to human ingenuity. But as you point out, it's harder to make this case in light of the example of natural farmers like the leafcutters. I wonder if we can make a principled distinction between the kind of farming human's engage in, or engaged in at the dawn of farming, and the example of leafcutter behavior. Does the question of who domesticated who even make sense or is it just an empty semantic debate?
The obvious point is that we conceptualize farming and its effects and deliberately engage in the practice. But this almost certainly wasn't the case initially. What would early farming need to look like to decide that we were domesticated by wheat rather than vice versa? I think a potentially relevant distinction is whether we deliberately engaged in proto-farming behavior, or was the success of some subset of early humans due to non-deliberate behavior that happened to enable proto-farming? Then, did the success of the proto-farmers lead to genetic adaptations for this new lifestyle? I don't know if we can recover enough information from the past to weigh in on this. Maybe the archeological record can reveal the duration of the proto-farming stage with corresponding genetic adaptations. A short duration of the proto-farming stage would suggest to me deliberate behavior. A long duration, enough for genetic adaptation, would suggest non-deliberate behavior and thus human adaptation to wheat prior to deliberate cultivation.
My mind is blown! I love the fact that when the ants leave to start a new colony, they bring their 'fungal seeds' with them!