Humans made the transition from a hunter-gatherer species to a farming based one over the course of a few thousand years, between 13,000 -8500 (Diamond, 2002). This process brought about the domestication of both plants and animals to provide human populations with the food required to survive. The domestication of species quite obviously involving a relationship between humans and the target species, where humans play the dominant role in its reproduction and its food supply (Diamond, 2002). However, it has been argued that the domestication of species is simply another representation of a mutualistic relationship, such as those that occur naturally outside from human influence (Zeder, 2006). However, this is an over-simplification and I do not feel is entirely true, as the species is manipulated purely for anthropogenic purposes. However, this could be seen as the species taking advantage of the willingness of humans to promote and develop them as an evolutionary pathway (Zeder, 2006).
The domestication of species is considered and important facet of biodiversity (Dirzo and Raven, 2003), this statement however is not intended to portray them in a good light. We depend on so few species to provide us with all of our dietary requirements, which our exploitation and capitalist economy has let to the decimation of original landscapes and through that, an overall loss in biodiversity through species extinctions. With our agricultural expansions, coupled with our explosive increase in global populations, the threat of further species extinctions is greater. The consequences of our exploitation within this industry, we are fragmenting landscapes, reducing original areas of species and creating isolated pockets of elevated levels of biodiversity, simply as they have yet to be exploited. It is within these isolated pockets where some of our last remaining species exist naturally in the wild. Examples include the Gorilla and the Orang-utan. However, as the theory of island biogeography states, as the size of the area in which species reside, population numbers decline due to increased competition for less resources (Whittaker and Fernandez-Palacios, 2007). A study of 173 mammalian species showed that historic range of species has declined by more than 50% )Dirzo and Raven, 2003). This therefore leads to the conclusion that increasing domestication, i.e. the spread of agricultural techniques, advancing hand in hand with increasing populations and urbanisation, will inevitably lead to a decline in biodiversity and add more species to the extinction list.
The domestication of species could potentially be labelled as a mistake. The first farmers did not set out with a goal for the domestication of species to be so prevalent; it was simply about surviving in conditions that did not allow hunter-gatherer techniques to be successful (Diamond, 2002). Perhaps if they had foreseen this then maybe the original settlers, at the very beginning of the Holocene, would have never allowed it to happen, had they been conscious of the world around them and their impacts on it. It is this factor, which has inadvertently contributed to the loss of many species.
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