Did Dog Domestication Contribute to Language Evolution?

Abstract

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.

Keywords: aggression; cognitive disorders; dog domestication; human self-domestication; language evolution; prosociality.

FIGURE 1

A graphical summary of our model of language evolution under the forces of self-domestication and the hypothesized feedback effect with dog domestication. The images of the wolf and the dog are from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).