A Comparison of Niche Construction Theory and Diet Breadth Models as Explanatory Frameworks for the Initial Domestication of Plants and Animals

The initial domestication of plants and animals and the subsequent emergence of agricultural economies in different world regions represent a major evolutionary transition in human history. Here, two alternative and antithetical explanatory frameworks for initial domestication are compared-one based on diet breadth modeling and the other on niche construction theory. This side-by-side comparison of these two alternative explanations follows them through the basic sequence of stages involved in the scientific method: hypothesis formulation, plausibility consideration, and actual testing of the two hypothetical explanations by measuring their relative strengths with the available archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from two independent centers of domestication in the Americas-eastern North America and the Neotropics. Although focused on the question of initial domestication, this comparative analysis also addresses the broader issues of the appropriate role of theory in the development of hypotheses of past human behavior and the proper use of the scientific method in archaeological inference. Explanations based on diet breadth modeling are found to have a number of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological flaws; approaches based on niche construction theory are far better supported by the available evidence in the two regions considered.