Society and ecology seem deeply linked to domestication, which may be the most threatening force acting on earth today, where the human may be its most immediate victim. This theoretical interdisciplinary analysis re-imagines domestication as the condition of housing—the built environment, leading to consider the human species as Homo domesticus. oscar.carvajal@utoronto.ca

1. Homo domesticus: Re-Imagining Domestication and Re-Naming the Human
By Oscar Carvajal, PhD ABD
© All rights reserved
Society and ecology seem deeply linked to domestication, which may be the most
threatening force acting on earth today, where the human may be its most immediate
victim. This theoretical interdisciplinary analysis re-imagines domestication as the
condition of housing—the built environment, leading to consider the human species as
Homo domesticus.
Scholars associate the rise of domestication and civilization. Humans were originally
unstable scattered nomads—hunters and foragers.[1] As housing, farming and herding
sprang up during the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition, civilization emerged and cities
arose.[2] Human life-styles proliferated at the expense of diverse domesticated
organisms as food stock, work force, social symbols, entertainment, technological
devices, field research, companions, decoration and pets.[3]
Traditional accounts see domestication as the collective alteration process that
organisms or biological populations endure under the control of generations of humans.
The essential criterion for domestication is the maintenance by humans of a self-
perpetuating breeding population of animals isolated genetically from their wild
relatives, with resulting behavioural, and usually also phenotypic, changes in the
domestic stock.[4]
Beyond such anthropocentric views that characterise domestication as a relation
between humans and other organisms, including animals and plants—the planet in
general—a fresh insight into a deeper dimension of domestication involves:
Firstly, re-distinguishing between domesticating and taming. Traditionally, the human is
seen as the agent of domestication. Scholars believe that domestication culminates the
process of taming (thought to only affect individuals): a species becomes domesticated
when humans tame every one of its members and its generations are born
domesticated. But that humans dominate other species—using criteria like diet
adaptability, fast growth rate, breed ability in captivity, disposition, unlikelihood to panic,
and submission to hierarchy of dominance—really refers to taming, breeding animals
and cultivating plants.[5] This approach neglects a critical aspect of domestication,
namely, the influence of the house—the domesticating agent. The Paleolithic-Neolithic
transition was distinct by the built environment, when humans, animals and plants
became domesticated. The domesticating action of the house goes further beyond the
initial taming action and intention when humans built the house.
Etymologically, “domes-tication” derives from the Latin root word domus—house, home.
Housing and domestication relate. Domestication was born with housing. The house
sin equanum domestication. John Livingston misleadingly argues that “To domesticate
some non-human being, literally, is to bring it into our house.”[6] It is misleading since

2. “to bring it” remains taming—humane. Simmilarly, C. E. Ayres argued that the human
species should be understood as Homo domesticus based on behaviour. For him, the
institutions and in large—as Livingston also concludes—culture domesticates the
human.[7] But instead of a type of taming humanly enforced, domestication is the
house acting directly.
Domestication and tame mutually reinforce conditioning, as the human tames and the
house domesticates. Whilst the evidence of taming associating humans and wolves
dates to 150,000 year ago, housing emerged in the last 30,000 years.
Secondly, domestication conditions beyond tame. Ivan Pavlov by conditioning reflex
with manipulated stimuli implied human use of science, technology and technique to
condition (tame) organisms.[8] Ideology may be the most important cultural tool—
hegemonic persuasive superstructure, in Antonio Gramsci‟s terms,[9] or instrument of
social reproduction, in Karl Marx‟s view[10]—in general, as a set of ideas or logic of
reasoning. Humans surely devised the house for survival ideologically and as
ideological medium. However, as Robert Hahn contends, the work of the architects
influenced the poetry and prose of Anaximander, hence Greek philosophy.[11]
The house impacts beyond ideology. For instance, caved humans devised protection,
not necessarily to self-confine into the much reduced built shelter, but many gradually
ended up its permanent residents. Humans may have initially thought of housing to
survive and to carry on ideas, but it became influent of ideology and culture beyond
human imagination.
Housing informs anatomy and cognition. Unconscious motives mould behaviour
(neurosis), claimed Sigmund Freud.[12] Likewise, genetic factors and environment
shape behaviour through either association or reinforcement, claimed John Watson, the
founder of the behaviourist school.[13] Like computing artificial intelligence, once the
system stores manipulated information, the now conditioned organism eventually
prompts to mutate. Genetic scientists see that the organism‟s makeup relates to the
information stored via genetic material. As managed record influences generational
change, mutation essentially obeys to change in genetic data.[14] Hence phenotype
and genotype mutually modify under domestication. Housing conditions matter and
mind. Such domestication informs the conscious and the unconscious, instincts,
genetics, motives, believes, behaviour and anatomy. In this way, domestication affects
organisms as existing entities at their very ontological level and essence of being,
beyond ideology.
Domestication forces evolutionary change. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace,[15] and
Patrick Matthew[16] challenged creationism—the belief that God created and sustains
the world—and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck‟s theory of use and disuse (known as
Lamarckism or Lamarckian inheritance)[17] and spoke of evolution by natural selection.
Darwin and Wallace argued that change in organisms occur as they adapt to their
environments. Gregor Mendel‟s gene theory completed the synthesis, which
amalgamates the notions of the common descent, the origin of novel traits in a lineage,

3. and the mechanisms that cause some traits to persist while others to perish.[18] The
synthesis mainly refers to reproduction with modification. Ultimately, the individual
organism and the environment of organisms mutually modify. Domestication and
taming collaborate to condition and cause modification, taming as human action,
domestication as the action of the house. Domestication continues to act as a
determinant evolutionary force.
Thirdly, the house functions as epitome or prototype of constructions. Domestication
refers to the influence of the built environment—in the broad sense—including
monuments, bridges, roads, dams, satellites, space stations, in general, settlements.
By fulfilling similar functions and standing with similar structures, the built environment
replicates the influence of the house. The built environment at large extends and
perpetuates the condition of the house.
Fourthly, the built environment domesticates the human. Peter Wilson contrasts
sedentary and nomadic ethnographies and argues that humans became domesticated
in small Neolithic towns. He names the small town life: domesticated human life.
Domesticated society relies to a great extent on the house as both a dominant
cultural symbol and a central relaying point and context for social organization
and activity.[19]
Wilson considers the villager domesticated, but nomad and urban humans as not
domesticated. However, humans continue rooted in the small Neolithic town and are
still influenced by the built environment. For instance, to own a house may be the
greatest quest throughout the entire life of an average modern human. The human
remains a domesticated species, hence should be understood as Homo domesticus.
Fifthly, domestication denotes the condition of the built environment, whether organisms
are inside or outside it. Without bringing it “into,” as Livingston suggests, the built
environment initiates the process of domesticating organisms directly, being inside or
outside, and not just with a derived impression from human agency.
Most traditions, deeming constructions as inert things—since their comparatively
apparent stillness and motionless feature—regard buildings as lifeless and
underestimate their lively and surreal influence, disregarding their organic living
properties. Buildings are made up of micro-living organisms, living cells, living
compounds. Buildings use air and oxygen, and breathe, as each one of their cells do.
They follow living patterns of emergence, development, and decay. Constructions are
born, grow up, fall in ruins, and die. They transfer energy and expand, and process and
dispose waste. Once it comes into being, whether actually or potentially, the living built
environment influences organisms on its own—actively and by means of reference—
with a life of its own.
Buildings shield and care. They surround, nurture and shape. They connect and
divide. Above its apparent benefits, the built environment not only transforms the social

4. and ecological environments topographically, it crams, consumes and pollutes.
Buildings require attention and maintenance for living standard. Once conceived and
coming into being, the built environment takes its own personality and presses its own
condition beyond human enterprise. It actively transforms its larger environment of
organisms. No doubt, humans initially built shelters for protection from the elements,
not necessarily wanting to hide from the firmament at night. But high-rise buildings
block the sunshine permanently. Diverse organisms linger underneath constructions
deprived from the sun, the wind and the rain. They interfere, even conceal humans
from the stars and the sky. The built environment prevents natural scents and
panoramas from reaching the human.
Human birth rates increased with domestication, as well.[20] Also, of course, humans
do not want to augment death rates during so-called natural disasters by collapsing
constructions. Buildings split kith and kin, and disturb habitats, forcing many more like
conditions upon domestic living creatures. The built environment has inspired the
creation of domestic human conglomerates, institutions, traditions and cultures. And
the most influential built environment of all may be the city.
Sixthly, architecture lies at the heart of the building enterprise and culture. Hahn
contends, logocentrism is to philosophy (search for truth) like arché (origin, self-
consciousness, and homogeneity, the limits of rationality) is to tecture.[21] Architectural
forms, John Hendrix explains, present epistemological structures, scientific and
philosophical beliefs, and artistic theories—the core of cultural expression and context.
They shift as cultural contexts shift and express emphasis through individual
psychologies and subjective experiences. Architecture manifests the domesticated
order. Wild may refer to disorder and chaos in the domestic society. Thus
phantasmagoric or fantastic forms, fragmentations and deformations enact the chaotic.
Psychasthenia, the inability to resolve knowingly irrational uncertainties and
neuroses, would then result from the loss of the self-identification of the subject
as a particular point in space in distinction from its surroundings…the evocation
of chaos and disorder in the unconscious…and the wild and unbounded in a
revolt against the tyranny of the material world and reason, and the metaphysical
extremes of the sublime and grotesque.[22]
Beyond ideology, architecture buries the individual and establishes order, maintaining
disorder or the wild in check. For Hendrix, architecture as nurtured by forms distorts.
Forms incant (alter and heighten emotion), repeating and disorienting to create
sensation instead of reflecting and reaffirming rational signifying structures. Inner
sensations combine with rhythmical measure to create mystical and incantatory
environments, suggesting unordinary knowledge. Negating the subject makes rational
knowledge impossible. Forms—obscuring rather than illuminating—entrap architecture,
informing, better, misinforming human knowledge. It is plain human arrogance to
pretend that humans control and drive the influence of the built environment.
Finally, domestication started in a nomadic context and was formally established via

5. sedentary living. Ruth Tringham points toward stating it indicating that “humans
themselves become domesticated through learning to live with each other in confined
spaces (architecture).”
The Neolithic is a time when people began to settle down and construct and live
in dwellings, which would last not only throughout the year but also for many
years, perhaps many generations... change that archaeologists call
„sedentism...‟[23]
Tringham‟s helpful approach, however, deserves qualification. “Sedentism” does not
correspond to domestication, but to settling. More distinctively, architecture denotes
built or framed rather than “confined” space. Resembling traditional accounts,
Tringham‟s view implies two conditions for human domestication, namely, human
agency by “learning to live with each other” and “in confined spaces (architecture).” But
previous to the emergence of built shelters, humans settled and learned to inhabit, with
each other, confined spaces—caves—and that did not make them domesticated.
Nomadic tribes became domesticated as built shelters emerged, first temporarily (while
continuing nomadic lifestyles), then permanently (becoming sedentary). The first
human centers of population were unsettled or transitory nomadic conglomerates in the
Palaeolithic. They evolved into long-lasting settlements in the Neolithic. More
distinctively than transiting from unsettled to settled societies, in terms of domestication,
humans were retrieving from natural environments to inhabit built environments.
While domestication emerged among nomads, the condition of buildings was
established firmly among settled peoples. Nevertheless, judging by the degree of
today‟s built environment, domestication now conditions sedentary and nomadic
peoples alike. The built environment stapled its indelible mark on earth. Domestication
is very recent but powerfully threatening. Greatly contributing to mass extinction and
unprecedented suffering via weaponry, pollution and global warming, the city embodies
the leading domestic intervention on society and ecology.
In summary, some 200,000 years ago, the single surviving anatomically hominid
species—the modern human—appeared in Africa and Asia, evolving some 30,000
years ago in the Near East into Homo domesticus. Modern humans continue to adapt
to the built environment in phenotypic and genotypic terms. They mutate, consciously
expending energy and resources responding to the demands of constructions, whether
conceiving, designing, building, maintaining, demolishing, rebuilding, and adjusting to
them, and unconsciously, getting along with them.
Because human life—including imagination—is domesticated, in fact, since humans
have become so dependent and addicted to domestication, the very human existence
would be in peril without the built environment, something truly unimaginable only a few
centuries ago.
In conclusion, the Palaeolithic-Neolithic transition refers distinctively to the emergence

6. of the build environment—in the broad sense—the age of domestication, the condition
of housing. Since modern humans continue to live under the condition of the
architectural built environment, the human species should be considered Homo
domesticus. The reach of the built environment shaping the human and the way of life
on earth seems disturbingly challenging, rendering domestication an unavoidable issue
when addressing social and ecological concerns.
[1] Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton University
Press, 1947).
[2] Harvey Weiss, ed., The Origins of Cities in Dry-farming Syria and Mesopotamia in
the Third Millennium B.C. (Guilford, Conn.: Four Quarters Pub. Co., 1986).
[3] Pam J. Crabtree and Kathleen Ryan, eds., Animal Use and Culture Change
(Philadelphia: MASCA, The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,
University of Pennsylvania, 1991).
[4] David R. Harris, “Domesticatory Relationships of People, Plants and Animals” in
Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, eds. Roy Ellen and Katsuyoshi
Fukui (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 454.
[5] Jared Mason Diamond is, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
[6] John A. Livingston, Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication
(Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited, 1994), 15.
[7] C. E. Ayres, “Instinct and Capacity --II: Homo Domesticus,” in Journal of Philosophy
18, no.1 (1921): 600-6.
[8] Ivan P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1927).
[9] Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince, and Other Writings (New York, International
Publishers, 1968).
[10] Karl Marx, Capital; A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, [1st German ed.
1867], Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans. from 3rd ed., Frederick Engels, ed., S.
Sonnenschein, 1889.
[11] Robert Hahn, Anaximander and the Architects: The Contributions of Egyptian and
Greek Architectural Technologies to the Origins of Greek Philosophy (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2001).
[12] Sigmund Freud, The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis (Berlin: S. Karger,

7. 1910).
[13] John Watson, Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (New York: H.
Holt, 1914).
[14] Wen Zhu and Stephen Freeland, “The Standard Genetic Code Enhances Adaptive
Evolution of Proteins,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 239, no. 1 (7 March 2006): 63-70.
[15] Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, On the Tendency of Varieties [to Depart
Indefinitely From the Original Type] and On the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species
by Natural Means of Selection [communicated by Sir Charles Lyell and J. D. Hooker;
read July 1st 1858] (London: Linnean Society of London, 1858).
[16] Patrick Matthew, On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (Edinburgh, A. Black;
Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, London, 1831).
[17] Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Philosophie Zoologique, ou,
Exposition des Considérations Relative à L'Histoire Naturelle des Animaux (Paris: Chez
Dentu [et] L‟Auteur, 1809).
[18] Gregor Johann Mendel, Versuche Uber Pflanzenhybriden [Experiments in
Hybridisation] (Westminster: Royal Horticultural Society, 1901).
[19] Peter J. Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1988), 4.
[20] Weiss, Ibid.
[21] Hahn, Ibid.
[22] John Hendrix, Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structure (New York: Peter
Lang, 2003), 174.
[23] Ruth Tringham, Unit Title: Life in the Neolithic 1 - Living in Houses (N.A.), [online],
available: http://www.mactia.berkeley.edu/aop/modules/Neo1_module_web.htm [2005,
December 18].