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A recent study from the University of Montpellier in southern France claims that humans have made domestic animals grow while wild creatures have shrunk. Tens of thousands of animal bones over the past 8,000 years in Mediterranean France were examined by researchers to determine how the sizes of both kinds of animals have evolved over time.
Scientists are already aware that environmental influences in addition to human actions like selective breeding affect the size of domestic animals. But how these two pressures have affected the size of domestic and wild animals over such a long period of time is not well understood. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has released a study that fills a significant knowledge gap.
The researchers examined over 225,000 bones from 311 Mediterranean French archeological sites. From domestic animals like goats, cattle, pigs, lambs, and chickens to wild species like deer, foxes, and rabbits, they measured hundreds of bones and teeth, including length, breadth, and depth.
However, the researchers’ attention was not just on the bones. Data about the temperature, the kinds of plants that grow there, the human population, and the land’s utilized purposes were also gathered. After that, they were able to identify the primary trends and factors influencing the shift in animal size thanks to some advanced statistical modeling.
According to the study team’s results, domestic and wild animals developed along comparable paths for almost 7,000 years, increasing and decreasing in tandem with their shared habitat and human activities. But it all changed around a thousand years ago. Particularly in the Middle Ages, they started to drastically differ in bodily size.
Due to active breeding for more meat and milk, domestic animals began to grow significantly in size. Human pressures like habitat loss and hunting caused wild animals to start becoming smaller at the same time. Put another way, environmental influences were largely displaced by human activity as the primary driver of evolution in animals.
According to the findings, domestic animal morphology was dominated by natural selection until the past millennium. When it comes to changing human-animal-environment connections, body size is a sensitive indication of systemic change that may reflect both resistance and fragility.
There is more to this work than just studying old bones. The results may also support contemporary conservation efforts by providing a long-term historical record of the ways in which human activities have impacted the animal world.
Sources:
Mureau, Cyprien et al. (2025). 8,000 years of wild and domestic animal body size data reveal long-term synchrony and recent divergence due to intensified human impact, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2503428122. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2503428122
8,000 years of human activities have caused wild animals to shrink and domestic animals to grow. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-years-human-wild-animals-domestic.html
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