Niche construction is an evolutionary process where an organism shifts selection pressures by actively changing the environment, which in turn changes gene frequencies in the population; a typical example is beavers building lodges, a behavior that selects for beavers with longer teeth and flatter tails. Another typical example in humans is the herding niche, where domestication of cattle for dairy selected for the lactase allele over approximately 300 generations.
In humans, niche construction is closely related to culture-gene coevolution.
@2008kydd calls the two forms of hominin niche construction that led to the emergence of religious behavior the fire niche and the handaxe niche, two domains that human excel at over any other animals. The fire niche refers to the theory that “cooking effectively externalizes the energetic load required for digestion, [freeing] more energy for brain metabolism,” while the handaxe niche refer to the theory that the use of sophisticated tools selected for genes coding for timing, accuracy, and mental rotation. Religion itself is a form of supernatural niche construction.