Human cultures do not travel alone ; they carry whole ecosystems in their wake (and destroy many others). Many species on Earth, such as wheat, dogs, leeches, and hundreds of pathogens, owe their evolutionary success to the use (cultural or not, voluntary or not) humans put them to. The limits are often difficult to trace between natural and artificial selection ; they merge into a very smooth continuum.

Agriculture is the most important recent event in human history. Students of cultural evolution are thoroughly investigating the conditions of its appearance.

Although germs, viruses and other pathogens cannot properly be called domesticates, they were produced by centuries of coevolution with Humans, a coevolution influenced by human technologies and culturally transmitted practices. Their major contribution to such events as the fall of Rome or the rise of western Europe in te Renaissance is currently a very popular thesis.

Pets are a wonderful object for evolutionary psychologists to study, for two reasons. First, natural selection selects in them certain traits that the human brain appreciates ; for example, being cute, or mimicking some attitudes humans interpret as loyalty, submission, friendliness, etc. Second, it is possible that (natural and artificial) selection endowed dogs with rudimentary cpacities for mental manipulation (for example, the capacity to follow our gaze and nunderstand some of our intentions. Dogs could be a non human example of an evolutionary trend towards Theory of Mind.

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