Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication Highlight

Oddly, tameness has also long been associated with traits such as a shorter face, a smaller head, floppy ears and white patches on fur—a pattern that Charles Darwin noted in the 1800s. The occurrence of these characteristics is known as domestication syndrome, but scientists didn’t have a comprehensive theory to explain how the traits were connected until 2014. That’s when a team of evolutionary biologists noticed that many of the physical traits that co-occur with domestication trace back to an important group of cells during embryonic development called neural crest cells.