Spring 2026 Distinguished Ethnobiology Speaker Natalie Mueller

Domestication as the Evolution of Interspecies Cooperative Care

In this free, open-access talk, Dr. Natalie Mueller discusses the intricate connections between evolution and care. Scholars of human evolution have proposed that cooperative care of infants and children enabled the evolution of costly human brains, long juvenile development, and a unique form of social intelligence. Humans went on to enfold other species into their networks of cooperative care. Protection and provisioning of young plants and animals can explain the evolution of domestication traits, including changes in development, loss of aggressive, defensive, and bet-hedging aspects of the phenotype, and increased fertility. The importance of cooperative breeding to human societies has made humans especially likely to enter into interspecies cooperative breeding relationships, but such relationships are not limited to humans. Dr. Mueller is an assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where she researches domestication, evolutionary biology, and historical ecology as an archaeologist and ethnobiologist.