If the egalitarian hunter-gatherers I talk about so much are the “stall point” in the runaway process of domestication, then why do they carry the same suite of domestication traits seen in your average 2025 city-dweller? The same smaller brains (~10-15%) compared to archaic Homo. The same reduced sexual dimorphism (males and females less divergent in body size and head features). The same gracile skeletons, shorter faces, and smaller teeth. The same prolonged juvenile traits.
Physiologically, they’re as domesticated as farmers, CEOs, and everyone else alive. The domestication syndrome is species-wide, and at first glance that seems to be a hole in my hypothesis.
I’d argue that where HGs differ isn’t in the physiological baseline, but in the social use of those traits. They maintain egalitarian checks (mocking, ostracism, flexible band membership) that prevent runaway hierarchy. They don’t fully overweight social priors at the expense of sensory/environmental feedback. And their “flattening” is limited…diverse behavior is tolerated, as long as no one seizes too much control. I see them as domesticated bodies living in relatively non-domesticating systems.
This is how I see it: a certain suite of traits emerges once as part of Homo sapiens’ domestication arc. Different systems (e.g. HG bands vs. states) then determine how that suite is expressed/reinforced/suppressed. Think of it as baseline domestication (the whole physiological package…universal by ~30,000 years ago) and runaway domestication (social systems amplifying the control side and pushing traits further…heavier attenuation and greater conformity).
Runaway domestication is where some extra behavioral flattening happens. The very strong selection against independence within control systems. Hunter-gatherers do exert control, but on a much smaller scale. You could say their control systems, while not allowing runaway hierarchy (kings and presidents), still weeded out the most disruptive unpredictability…people who can’t cooperate at all, or who are violently antisocial. But under agriculture and states (post Younger Dryas), that weeding out is magnified into systems of slavery, bureaucracy, and mass coercion. The driver is the same (selection against independence)…it’s the degree that’s different.
We’re talking about a 2-stage process, then. The species-wide baseline (enough selection against reactivity/autonomy to stabilize a group) and a civilizational runaway (the selection against independence becomes way more aggressive).
If that sounds like bullshit to you, consider the Australia case.
Anatomically modern humans reached Australia around 65,000 years ago. That’s before the sharpest phase of human brain-size shrinkage ~30,000-10,000 years ago (a known marker of domestication in animals and humans). The original Australian populations diverged early and developed in almost complete isolation from later Eurasian agricultural/civilizational pressures. They remained foragers until very recently (colonial contact), and while they engaged in complex land management systems (fire-stick farming and aquaculture), there was no large-scale ag, urbanism, or state hierarchy. In other words, they had far less exposure to the kinds of control systems that I accuse of driving runaway domestication.
And what do we see?
Sure enough, fossil and skeletal data from Australia populations don’t show anywhere near the same degree of gracilization that appears in Holocene Eurasia. They have robust cranial and skeletal features compared to Europeans of the same era. That suggests to me that the full domestication suite probably didn’t occur in the same way there. You could say they carry the “baseline” domestication package, but not the civilizational package.
If full domestication is selection against unpredictability in control systems, then societies without large-scale control systems (like foragers in Australia) should show less of what I’m calling runaway domestication. And that’s exactly what we see.
The First to Fall 
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