Did Dog Domestication Contribute to Language Evolution?

Different factors seemingly account for the emergence of present-day languages in our species. Human self-domestication has been recently invoked as one important force favoring language complexity mostly via a cultural mechanism. Because our self-domestication ultimately resulted from selection for...

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Published inFrontiers in psychology Vol. 12; p. 695116
Main Authors Benítez-Burraco, Antonio, Pörtl, Daniela, Jung, Christoph
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Frontiers Media S.A 13.09.2021
Subjects
aggression
cognitive disorders
dog domestication
human self-domestication
language evolution
prosociality
Psychology
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Summary:Different factors seemingly account for the emergence of present-day languages in our species. Human self-domestication has been recently invoked as one important force favoring language complexity mostly via a cultural mechanism. Because our self-domestication ultimately resulted from selection for less aggressive behavior and increased prosocial behavior, any evolutionary or cultural change impacting on aggression levels is expected to have fostered this process. Here, we hypothesize about a parallel domestication of humans and dogs, and more specifically, about a positive effect of our interaction with dogs on human self-domestication, and ultimately, on aspects of language evolution, through the mechanisms involved in the control of aggression. We review evidence of diverse sort (ethological mostly, but also archeological, genetic, and physiological) supporting such an effect and propose some ways of testing our hypothesis.
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Reviewed by: Takefumi Kikusui, Azabu University, Japan; Brian Hare, Duke University, United States
Edited by: William Shiyuan Wang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, SAR China
This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.695116