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Humans & Dogs: Cooperation / Co-Evolution / Domestication

Clever use of leftovers.

Sometime between around 29,000 and 14,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers navigating northern Eurasia’s frigid landscapes turned wolves into dogs by feeding them lean-meat leftovers.

That, at least, is a likely scenario that would have benefited both wolves and people, say archaeologist Maria Lahtinen of the Finnish Food Authority in Helsinki and colleagues. In harsh Ice Age winters, when game hunted by both species was lean and fat-free, prey animals would have provided more protein than humans could safely consume, the researchers conclude January 7 in Scientific Reports. People could have fed surplus lean meat to captured wolf pups being raised as pets because the animals wouldn’t have had the same dietary limitations, the team proposes.

That idea is largely based on inferences from previous research on how ancient hunter-gatherers survived in arctic environments and new calculations suggesting that, for dietary reasons, Ice Age groups could not have eaten all of the lean meat that was hunted. Though far from the final word on the controversial origins of dogs (SN: 5/21/15), Lahtinen’s group offers a novel take on how that process may have unfolded. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ice-age-hunters-leftovers-may-have-fueled-dog-domestication
 
ramonmercado said:
Clever use of leftovers.

Sometime between around 29,000 and 14,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers navigating northern Eurasia’s frigid landscapes turned wolves into dogs by feeding them lean-meat leftovers.

That, at least, is a likely scenario that would have benefited both wolves and people, say archaeologist Maria Lahtinen of the Finnish Food Authority in Helsinki and colleagues. In harsh Ice Age winters, when game hunted by both species was lean and fat-free, prey animals would have provided more protein than humans could safely consume, the researchers conclude January 7 in Scientific Reports. People could have fed surplus lean meat to captured wolf pups being raised as pets because the animals wouldn’t have had the same dietary limitations, the team proposes.

That idea is largely based on inferences from previous research on how ancient hunter-gatherers survived in arctic environments and new calculations suggesting that, for dietary reasons, Ice Age groups could not have eaten all of the lean meat that was hunted. Though far from the final word on the controversial origins of dogs (SN: 5/21/15), Lahtinen’s group offers a novel take on how that process may have unfolded. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ice-age-hunters-leftovers-may-have-fueled-dog-domestication
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dog.png
 
More on Siberian domestication.

Sometime toward the end of the last ice age, a group of humans armed with stone-tipped spears stalked their prey in the bitter cold of northeastern Siberia, tracking bison and woolly mammoths across a vast, grassy landscape.

Beside them ran wolflike creatures, more docile than their ancestors and remarkably willing to help their primate companions hunt down prey and drag it back to camp. These were the world’s first dogs. Their descendants flowed both west and east, populating Eurasia as well as accompanying the ancestors of Native Americans as they spread into the Americas.

That’s the scenario laid out in a new study combining DNA data from ancient dogs and humans. The analysis, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, aims to end years of debate about where and when dogs were domesticated. It may even explain how wary wolves were transformed into faithful companions in the first place.

"I love this study,” says Jennifer Raff, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and an expert on ancient people in the Americas. More genomes from ancient dogs and people will be needed to confirm the findings, she says, but already, “It’s amazing to see how the dog story and the human story match up.” ...

Going even deeper into the genetic past, the team found that the A2b dogs descended from a canine ancestor that lived in Siberia about 23,000 years ago. That ancestral dog probably lived with people who belonged to a genetic grouping known as the ancient north Siberians, the team speculates. The group, which appeared more than 31,000 years ago, lived in a relatively temperate part of northeastern Siberia for thousands of years, barred by a harsh climate from moving too far east or west. They shared this oasis with the gray wolf, the direct ancestor of today’s dogs. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...rs-may-have-domesticated-dogs-23000-years-ago
 
ramonmercado said:
Wolves are more logical and philosophical than dogs.

Domestic dogs may have lost some of their innate animal skill when they came in from the wild, according to new research conducted at the Wolf Science Center in Austria.

In a study comparing wolves and dogs living in near-identical environments, wolves were better at working some things out, particularly at grasping the notion of cause and effect.

The research, by an international team in Austria, the Netherlands, Germany and England, is published in Scientific Reports.

Recently graduated lead author Michelle Lampe, of the Radboud University, in the Netherlands, said: "Children learn the principle of cause and effect early on, that if you touch a hot stove you will get burned, for example. Our study has shown the wolf also understands such connections, but our four-legged domesticated companions don't.

"It seems wolves are better at working some things out than dogs, which suggests domestication has changed dogs' cognitive abilities.

"It can't be ruled out that the differences could be due to wolves being more persistent in exploring than dogs. Dogs are conditioned to receive food from us, whereas wolves have to find food themselves in nature."

Michelle Lampe, Dr Zsófia Virányi, of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Dr Juliane Bräuer, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany, and Dr Juliane Kaminski, of the University of Portsmouth, UK, investigated the reasoning abilities of 14 dogs and 12 human-socialised wolves.

The tests included the animals having to choose between two objects, one containing hidden food and the other empty to see whether the animals could make use of communicative cues, such as direct eye-contact and pointing gestures to choose the correct container. ...

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-wolves-effect-dogs.html
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I think the theory that dogs can't grasp cause and effect may very much depend on the dog (and the cause and the effect). My old collie cross learned VERY fast that an electric fence makes a clicking sound and you stay away from it, He also used to behave in a 'guilty' way when the old terrier had done something bad, Current terrier either can't, or, more likely, doesn't want to, get to grips with it.
 
Dogs got cooked meat and fire warmth from humans, and as pack animals they are able to adapt their behaviors to work with humans. We got all kinds of things from our proto-dogs, no need to mention. And now we keep them as tools and toys. While we are being controlled by.. Cats.. It's mutual oxytocin generation now, selected for by selective breeding early on, probably.
 
catseye said:
I think the theory that dogs can't grasp cause and effect may very much depend on the dog (and the cause and the effect). My old collie cross learned VERY fast that an electric fence makes a clicking sound and you stay away from it, He also used to behave in a 'guilty' way when the old terrier had done something bad, Current terrier either can't, or, more likely, doesn't want to, get to grips with it.
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We used to have Airedale Terriers when I was a kid; ridiculous amounts of energy --we would probably need only about five Terriers to power the United States if they were hooked up properly. At one point we had ten puppies on a farm; they all started howling one night and then went right through glass French doors in the farmhouse we were living in --as a pack, and I don't even think any of them were hurt by it. Happened in this farmhouse, now an alpaca farm:
farmhouse_pacas1_5f7de0cd-5056-b3a8-491bcb4d32ec4f6b.jpg
 
Dogs are still our best friends.

Wiggles and wobbles and a powerful pull toward people — that’s what 8-week-old puppies are made of.

From an early age, dogs outpace wolves at engaging with and interpreting cues from humans, even if the dogs have had less exposure to people, researchers report online July 12 in Current Biology. The result suggests that domestication has reworked dogs’ brains to make the pooches innately drawn to people — and perhaps to intuit human gestures.

Compared with human-raised wolf pups, dog puppies that had limited exposure to people were still 30 times as likely to approach a strange human, and five times as likely to approach a familiar person. “I think that is by far the clearest result in the paper, and is powerful and meaningful,” says Clive Wynne, a canine behavioral scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe who was not involved in the study.

Wolf pups are naturally less entranced by people than dogs are. “When I walked into the [wolf] pen for the first time, they would all just run into the corner and hide,” says Hannah Salomons, an evolutionary anthropologist studying dog cognition at Duke University. Over time, Salomons says, most came to ignore her, “acting like I was a piece of furniture.” ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dog-puppy-brain-people-wolves-domestication
 
There is a lovely Guardian article about this from the early 2000s. I'll look for it.
Can remember discussing it with Escet as we walked my dogs* along a canal.

*That's my highly-evolved, impeccably-behaved dogs who thoroughly enjoyed barking at cattle and ponies, stealing fishermen's bait and falling in and having to be rescued before a boat ran them down.
 

Ancient dogecoin: 2,000 years ago, humans used dogs as currency, study suggests​

Genetic studies suggest that dogs were used as financial instruments thousand of years ago. A new study sheds further light on just how dogs may have been traded by ancient humans — in part by looking at their genes.

siberian-husky.jpg


An international team of researchers led by scholars from the University of Copenhagen studied the genomes of Siberian and Eurasian Steppe dogs, both ancient and historical, to understand their lineage. Although these dogs were genetically homogenous between 7,000 and 9,500 years ago, at least 2,000 years ago they began to show signs of genetic influence from dogs wh[ich] originated further west. Because archaeological sites that correspond to where these dogs lived also included nonlocal materials like metal items and glass beads, it is logical to assume that dogs were traded as part of a much larger trade network. Indeed, the introduction of these foreign dogs into the Siberian community’s canine gene pool also coincided with important developments like the introduction of metallurgy and the use of reindeer for farming and transportation.

“Altogether, this suggests that these profound transformations in Northwest Siberia were linked with the importation of material culture (including dogs) from neighboring regions through the establishment of large-scale trade networks,” the authors conclude.

“It looks like the human populations were more or less genetically isolated and did not mix with outside populations,” lead author Tatiana Feuerborn told Heritage Daily. “We do not see that with dogs, which indicates that dogs were traded rather than moving with people. So there definitely were interactions between populations in these areas of Siberia.”

https://cryptobuzz.co.uk/2021/09/29...-humans-used-dogs-as-currency-study-suggests/

maximus otter
 
The 7,000 years is just a woof estimate.

Ancient Arctic communities traded with the outside world as early as 7,000 years ago, DNA from the remains of Siberian dogs suggests.

Analysis of the DNA shows that Arctic pups thousands of years ago were interbreeding with other dogs from Europe and the Near East, even while they and their owners were living in one of the most remote places on Earth. Along with previous archeological finds, these results suggest that Siberians long ago were connected to a vast trade network that may have extended as far as the Mediterranean and the Caspian Sea, researchers report in the Sept. 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dogs have been valuable commodities in the Arctic for the last 9,500 years and have been used for sledding, hunting, herding reindeer, clothing and food. Because the region is remote, scientists thought local dogs — and their owners — had been completely isolated from the rest of the world for much of that time, an idea supported by the fact that ancient Siberians didn’t exchange much DNA with people outside of the region, says Tatiana Feuerborn, an archeologist at the University of Copenhagen.

But previous archeological evidence — including the discovery of glass beads and other foreign goods entombed alongside 2,000-year-old dogs near the Yamal Peninsula in Russia — suggested that these communities were trading with other cultures beyond the Arctic.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dog-dna-ancient-trade-network-arctic-siberia-europe-near-east
 
Its called puppy selling.

We are getting to understand that prehistoric Siberia was a busy place with a lot of connections, and adapting those connections to the harsh climate.

Hence, Reindeer instead of cattle
 
ramonmercado said:
A tale of wolves who helped farmers who were a relict population of Ice Age wolves. (The wolves were the relict population but I don't rule out the possibility of the farmers being werewolves.)

JENA, GERMANY—On the island of Honshū in Japan, farmers long appreciated a small gray wolf as a guardian of their crops because its howls warned them of raiders such as wild boars. In folklore, “the Honshū wolf” was seen as a spirit of the forest and honored with shrines. But when the wolves got rabies from dogs in the 19th century, farmers shot and poisoned them until the last wolf died in 1905.

Now, only a few stuffed Honshū wolves, like the one shown above, exist in museums. But they were indeed representatives of a wilder era, as graduate student Jonas Niemann of the University of Copenhagen found to his surprise. When he and his colleagues analyzed the genome of a Honshū wolf skeleton from the Natural History Museum in London, they found that this wolf appeared to be a relic of an ancient group of wolves that ranged across the Northern Hemisphere until 20,000 years ago.

The wolf’s DNA more closely resembled that of a long-extinct wolf that lived in Siberia more than 35,000 years ago than that of living Eurasian and American wolves, ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...ly_2018-09-25&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2391561
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More on the origins of the Japanese Wolf (and the origins of Dogs).

If you were walking through a dark forest in ancient Japan, you might hope to run into an okuri-ōkami, a wolf that would escort you safely to your destination.

This creature of folklore may be based on the Japanese wolf, a border collie–size animal with short legs and stubby ears that lived in Japan for thousands of years until humans wiped it out in the early 20th century. Now, scientists studying ancient DNA from this wolf’s bones say they may have solved the long-standing mystery of where it came from: a vanished population of gray wolves in East Asia that also gave rise to modern dogs.

“It’s a very meticulous study,” says Peter Savolainen, a geneticist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm who was not involved. The research, he says, adds evidence to the idea that dogs arose in East Asia, as he and other researchers suspect, rather than in Europe or the Middle East, as some experts have proposed.

All of today’s dogs likely descend from a single population of gray wolves. But exactly where and when those wolves lived has long been a source of contentious debate. Part of the problem is that although the species persists, that original population has likely vanished, wiping out genetic clues about doggy origins.

Enter the Japanese wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax). Described by some as one of the greatest mysteries in the history of Japanese zoology, the animal’s origins are unclear, as is the route it took to reach Japan. A genetic analysis of remains from a single Japanese wolf published earlier this year found it was closely related to a lineage of Siberian wolves, long thought extinct. Recent evidence also suggests dogs may have arisen in Siberia. Might Japanese wolves and dogs share more than just geography? ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/mysterious-extinct-japanese-wolf-may-hold-clues-origins-dogs
 
Not weird, just sweet; there's a statue in a nearby town to a service dog who detected IEDs in Afghanistan.
Next time time we're over there we'll investigate.

How 'world's bravest dog' got his statue in Cheshire community garden

Treo won the Dickin Medal for service in Afghanistan and is immortalised in Congleton's community gardens

Sgt Heyhoe and Treo were deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2008, where Treo was one of 25 canines supporting the force.

Treo became renowned even by the enemy for his skill at detecting IEDs, with British troops having intercepted radio traffic hearing them talk about ‘the black dog’.

Between August and September 2008, Treo found IEDs called ‘daisy chains’ where multiple explosives were wired together by the Taliban. His bravery saved the life of a great number of British soldiers and civilians during his service.

The little black dog retired in August 2009, and was awarded the Dickin Medal in February 2010 at the Imperial War Museum, in London. He was the medal’s 63rd recipient.
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An ancient wolf gene variant assisted in dog breeding.

When humans began intensively breeding dogs in 19th century Great Britain, they created a cornucopia of canines seemingly out of whole cloth: hulking bullmastiffs, graceful golden retrievers, and pint-size Yorkshire terriers.

But the real key to their success, a new study reveals, was taking advantage of two tiny but powerful genetic ratchets that have controlled the size of canines for ages—including one gene variant that nearly vanished in wolves around the end of the last ice age.

“It’s a great paper,” says Adam Boyko, an expert on canine genetics at Cornell University who was not involved with the work. The study, he says, doesn’t just question origin myths about modern dog breeding—it challenges a hypothesis about the very beginnings of canine domestication. Many scientists believe that early humans, via intensive early selection for smaller, more docile wolves, helped lock in a new genetic signature that made dogs smaller—and thus less threatening and hungry—than their gray wolf ancestors, he says. “This research suggests that we didn’t create it—it was already there.”

The new study traces its beginnings to 2007, when scientists led by Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, discovered a major genetic player in doggy dimensions. When the team scanned the DNA of thousands of dogs, it hit on a gene called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), which was responsible for 15% of the size difference between breeds. That may not sound like much, Ostrander says, but that’s a lot of work for a single gene to do. “In humans, the difference between being 5’6” and 6’6” is hundreds of genes.” It was unclear, however, exactly which genetic changes caused IGF1 to turn some dogs into giants and others into pipsqueaks. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-toy-dog-breeds-found-ancient-wolves
 
ramonmercado said:
An ancient wolf gene variant assisted in dog breeding.

When humans began intensively breeding dogs in 19th century Great Britain, they created a cornucopia of canines seemingly out of whole cloth: hulking bullmastiffs, graceful golden retrievers, and pint-size Yorkshire terriers.

But the real key to their success, a new study reveals, was taking advantage of two tiny but powerful genetic ratchets that have controlled the size of canines for ages—including one gene variant that nearly vanished in wolves around the end of the last ice age.

“It’s a great paper,” says Adam Boyko, an expert on canine genetics at Cornell University who was not involved with the work. The study, he says, doesn’t just question origin myths about modern dog breeding—it challenges a hypothesis about the very beginnings of canine domestication. Many scientists believe that early humans, via intensive early selection for smaller, more docile wolves, helped lock in a new genetic signature that made dogs smaller—and thus less threatening and hungry—than their gray wolf ancestors, he says. “This research suggests that we didn’t create it—it was already there.”

The new study traces its beginnings to 2007, when scientists led by Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, discovered a major genetic player in doggy dimensions. When the team scanned the DNA of thousands of dogs, it hit on a gene called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), which was responsible for 15% of the size difference between breeds. That may not sound like much, Ostrander says, but that’s a lot of work for a single gene to do. “In humans, the difference between being 5’6” and 6’6” is hundreds of genes.” It was unclear, however, exactly which genetic changes caused IGF1 to turn some dogs into giants and others into pipsqueaks. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-toy-dog-breeds-found-ancient-wolves
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But how did they breed those dog-headed men that some folks see?

Actually, I'd rather not know...
 
ramonmercado said:
An ancient wolf gene variant assisted in dog breeding.

When humans began intensively breeding dogs in 19th century Great Britain, they created a cornucopia of canines seemingly out of whole cloth: hulking bullmastiffs, graceful golden retrievers, and pint-size Yorkshire terriers.

But the real key to their success, a new study reveals, was taking advantage of two tiny but powerful genetic ratchets that have controlled the size of canines for ages—including one gene variant that nearly vanished in wolves around the end of the last ice age.

“It’s a great paper,” says Adam Boyko, an expert on canine genetics at Cornell University who was not involved with the work. The study, he says, doesn’t just question origin myths about modern dog breeding—it challenges a hypothesis about the very beginnings of canine domestication. Many scientists believe that early humans, via intensive early selection for smaller, more docile wolves, helped lock in a new genetic signature that made dogs smaller—and thus less threatening and hungry—than their gray wolf ancestors, he says. “This research suggests that we didn’t create it—it was already there.”

The new study traces its beginnings to 2007, when scientists led by Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, discovered a major genetic player in doggy dimensions. When the team scanned the DNA of thousands of dogs, it hit on a gene called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), which was responsible for 15% of the size difference between breeds. That may not sound like much, Ostrander says, but that’s a lot of work for a single gene to do. “In humans, the difference between being 5’6” and 6’6” is hundreds of genes.” It was unclear, however, exactly which genetic changes caused IGF1 to turn some dogs into giants and others into pipsqueaks. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/gene-toy-dog-breeds-found-ancient-wolves
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Wouldn't this simply fall under the category of evolution? Makes one wonder, if we had not messed with them, genetically, would they all be one size?
 
Canine inflation.

European dogs doubled in size from 8000 to 2000 years ago, a new study suggests. The beefing up may have helped our canine pals protect sheep from bears and even their direct ancestor—the gray wolf.

It’s “important” research, says Robert Losey, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, who specializes in ancient human-animal relationships but was not involved with the work. “It’s one of the few long-term studies based in Europe looking at trends in dog size over time.”

Dogs were domesticated between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. Little is known about the size and roles of the earliest pups, though they were likely smaller than the gray wolves they came from. Scientists have speculated that ancient dogs may have helped humans hunt and pull sleds.

To see how the size—and jobs—of dogs changed over time, Martin Welker, a zooarchaeology curator at the Arizona State Museum, and his colleagues examined the remains of 14 dogs uncovered from ancient human settlements in Croatia. They also incorporated data from another 45 ancient dogs, some from Croatia and some from neighboring countries. The remains dated from about 8000 years ago in the Neolithic (or latter Stone Age) to the Roman period, about 2000 years ago.

https://www.science.org/content/article/early-dogs-may-have-doubled-size-protect-livestock
 
Another woof estimate on when the domestication began and where it originated. But this lot worked hard and deserve a treat:

The paper’s 81 co-authors—mostly archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists—pooled their collective resources and sequenced 66 ancient wolf genomes and incorporated six previously published ones, from sites across Europe, Siberia, and North America. The ages of these animals spanned the past 100,000 years. Next, the team used computer software to compare the 72 ancient genomes and work out a rough family tree.

Where and when dogs arose is one of the biggest mysteries of domestication.

To solve it, researchers have tried everything from analyzing ancient dog bones to sequencing modern dog DNA—all with inconclusive results. Now, researchers have tried a new tack: figuring out where the ancient wolves that gave rise to dogs lived. The new study doesn’t close the case, but it does point to a broad geographic region—eastern Eurasia—while also suggesting our canine pals may have been domesticated more than once.

That region “certainly jibes with what I’ve been thinking,” says Adam Boyko, a canine geneticist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved in the work. He remains skeptical, however, about the possibility of separate domestication events.

At least 15,000 years ago—and perhaps closer to 23,000 years ago—humans and wolves began their fateful dance toward domestication. This was during the last ice age, when high-latitude regions experienced a bitterly cold, dry climate. According to the most prominent theory, less timid gray wolves inched closer and closer to human campsites to get scraps. Over time, they passed along genes for increasingly docile behaviors and traits. Humans found these newfound friends useful for hunting and guarding campsites.

Exactly where this happened is hotly contested. Some genetic analyses of modern dogs suggest they arose in East Asia, whereas other genetic and archaeological evidence indicates our pups came from Siberia, the Middle East, Western Europe, or perhaps multiple places. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-wolves-give-clues-origins-dogs
 
During the height of the covid one out of every five Americans obtained a pet.

Now there is a crisis at animal shelters in the U.S. as these pets are being dropped off at very over crowded animal shelters.

The biggest complaint is the pet is taking up too much of the family budget.
 

Ancient Siberian dogs relied on humans for seafood diets​


As early as 7,400 years ago, Siberian dogs had evolved to be far smaller than wolves, making them more dependent on humans for food including sea mammals and fish trapped below the ice, a new study showed Friday.

Robert Losey of the University of Alberta, who led the research published in Science Advances, said the findings helped explain the growth in the early dog population, as people put them to work for hunting, herding and sledding.

"The long term changes in dog diet have really been oversimplified," he told AFP, explaining that prior work had focused only on two main ideas to explain how dogs transitioned from wolves, a process that began some 40,000 years ago.

The first of these was that friendlier wolves approached human camps during the Ice Age to scavenge for meat, eventually became isolated from their wild counterparts, and were then intentionally bred into dogs.

The second was that some dogs evolved a better capacity to digest starches following the agricultural revolution, which is why some modern dog breeds have more copies of the AMY2B gene that creates pancreatic amylase.

To study ancient dog diets in more depth, Losey and colleagues analyzed the remains of around 200 ancient dogs from the past 11,000 years, and a similar number of ancient wolves.

They discovered that dogs of 7,000-8,000 years ago "were already quite small, meaning that they just couldn't do the things that most wolves were doing," said Losey.

This in turn led to greater dependence on humans for food, and reliance on small prey and scavenging, rather than prey bigger than themselves, which wolves hunt.

"We see that dogs have marine diets, meaning they're eating fish, shellfish, seals and sea lions, which they can't easily get themselves," he said.

Ancient dogs were found to be eating fish "in areas of Siberia where the lakes and rivers are frozen over for seven to eight months of the year."

Wolves of the time, and today, were hunting in packs and mainly eating various species of deer.

These new diets brought dogs both benefits and challenges.

"Beneficial because they could access stuff from humans, and those are oftentimes easy meals, but it came with the costs of all these new diseases and problems, like not enough nutrition," said Losey.

https://phys.org/news/2022-07-ancient-siberian-dogs-humans-seafood.html

maximus otter
 
ramonmercado said:
. He remains skeptical, however, about the possibility of separate domestication events.
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This puzzles me. Surely, surely domestication must have happened, at an individual level, many many times? From someone finding an abandoned wolf cub and taking it home to bring up and become a 'pet', and maybe breed if they found out it was useful, to various isolated tribes having varied success with tempting wolves into the camp and using them to help hunt?

Given the usefulness of dogs (wolves) to humans in hunting, and the ability of wolves to 'breed out' aggression and 'breed in' domesticity - surely this must have happened LOTS of times, before it became a general 'thing'? As in it happened all over the place individually, with then perhaps one dominant tribe moving about a lot with their hunting 'dogs' and everyone else getting the idea and in on the act.
 
Myths and shaggy dog stories.

It’s true that humankind’s close relationship with canines spans millennia (SN: 7/18/17).

This long-term interspecies friendship is a topic of intense scientific study, though where, when and even why it began remains murky (SN: 7/6/17). Short a talking dog, scientists have had to rely on archaeological and genetic evidence for clues (SN: 6/2/16). But the similarities between wolves and early domesticated dogs can make it challenging for researchers to tell them apart. In the earliest days, before wolves were fully domesticated, perhaps the most notable difference is simply the animals’ involvement with people.

That’s where storytelling can help, says historian Julien d’Huy of the College of France in Paris. Our penchant for mythologizing canine companions may be just as ancient as our relationship with them, so d’Huy is turning to these stories in a bid to shed more light on the history of dog domestication.

Some historians argue that using mythology to track human migration and the spread of information is unreliable because stories change quickly (SN: 1/19/16). D’Huy disagrees: Dogs play a starring role in many cultural origin stories, and since these myths are central to identity, that gives them stability over time, he says.

“With mythology, we can have explanations of archaeology, we can have reasons for domestication, we can test hypotheses,” he says.

a 13th-century watercolor of a blue river, light brown hare and dark brown dog, surrounded by Arabic text
A painting of a dog (bottom) represents the constellation Canis Major — and its brilliant star Sirius — in this 13th century watercolor by Persian cosmographer Zakariyya ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini. The great dog, also known as al-Kalib al-Akbar, shares the page with the constellations Eridanus (top), the river, and Lepus (middle), the hare.CHARLES LANG FREER ENDOWMENT/FREER GALLERY OF ART/SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

D’Huy found three core storylines for the earliest myths related to dogs: The first links dogs with the afterlife, the second relates to the union of humans and dogs, and the third associates a dog with the star Sirius. Versions of these stories are found in many cultural regions around the world. He then borrowed statistical tools from biology to create family trees of myths, showing how the stories evolved as they followed humans from one region of the world to another.

Folktales about dogs stemmed from Central and Eastern Asia and spread to Europe, the Americas and later Australia and Africa, d’Huy reports in the June Anthropozoologica. This mythological travel route parallels a proposed path of dog domestication borne out by genetic and fossil evidence (SN: 3/1/21).

“This was a surprise,” d’Huy says. He wasn’t sure if dogs and our mythology about them would migrate together.

“It is certainly arguable that dogs were first domesticated in Asia,” says Pat Shipman, a retired paleoanthropologist and author of Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs. Using mythology is a clever way to peer into the past, she says, because it can provide insight into how ancient humans valued dogs.

The prevalence of ancient myths identifying dogs as guides to the afterlife hint that our ancestors initially domesticated wolves not for hunting partners, as commonly believed, but for spiritual and symbolic reasons, d’Huy argues. This hypothesis fits with certain archaeological finds, he says, such as a 14,000-year-old grave in Germany containing a couple and two dogs. The woman was found with her hand resting on one of the dogs’ heads.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dog-domestication-origin-mythology-history
 
It's a slight tangent, but "The Goodness Paradox" (nicely reviewed here) suggests that one of the defining features of humans is that we would band together and basically kill ingroup members who were damaging to the ingroup, especially if over-aggressive or competitive (or, I suspect, if a bit lazy).

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-distinctiveness-of-human-aggression/

It occurs to me, that in prehistory, the same process might have been ruthlessly applied to the first dog packs following proto-men about, rapidly 'evolving' the pack trailing the tribe into one friendly to the tribe, or in fact to consider themselves as part of the larger 'pack'.
 
Direct bonding with wolves.

In the late 1970s, archaeologists made a stunning find in northern Israel. In a 12,000-year-old village, where families buried loved ones under their homes, they uncovered the remains of a woman and a young dog, her hand resting on the puppy’s chest.

The find is some of the earliest evidence of the bond between humans and our canine pals, perhaps the most powerful emotional connection between species in the animal kingdom. But even after years of study researchers are divided on how this bond began. Did it arise over thousands of years, as early dogs became tamer and more attuned to human behaviors? Or was this fire already burning in the ancestors of dogs: the gray wolf?

A new study of young wolves suggests they are indeed capable of making doglike attachments to people. Under some circumstances, they might even view humans as a source of comfort and protection.

The findings add support to the idea that wolves may harbor some traits once thought exclusive to dogs, says Monique Udell, a human-animal interaction researcher at Oregon State University, Corvallis, who was not involved with the work. But other experts say the study was not well designed and therefore is not convincing.

The new work utilizes an experiment known as the Strange Situation test. Originally created to study attachment between human infants and their mothers, it measures how the stress of being confronted with an unfamiliar person or setting changes a subject’s behavior when they’re reunited with their caregiver. More interaction implies a tighter bond.

https://www.science.org/content/article/can-wolves-bond-people-dogs-do
 
Myriad mutt mutations.

A way to map the ancestry of dog breeds reveals the genetic basis of stereotypical dog behaviors


From the energetic border collie to the friendly golden retriever, more than 350 dog breeds exist today, each with specific physical and behavioral traits. Although previous research on dog genomes has revealed the genetic basis of variations in body size and shape among breeds, the genetic underpinning of complex behaviors—hunting, herding, guarding, pointing, drafting, and more—has been a tough challenge to crack.

Now researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) have discovered that the ancestry relationships of eight or so major dog lineages map onto distinctive behaviors. As a result, the investigators could identify the underlying genetic basis of those behaviors. One major finding was that many genes involved in axon guidance, which determines how neurons connect to one another in the brain, had been changed in several lineages—and that was especially the case in the sheepdog lineage. Because the genes that influence brain development and behavior in dogs are likely to do the same in humans, identifying genetic variation in the locations of the human genome corresponding to those behavior-related regions in the dog genome could lead to new insights about the genetic basis of human behaviors and psychiatric conditions, the researchers say.

“This paper brings behavior back to the forefront when we think about where selection has acted in the evolution of dog breeds,” says Evan Maclean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona, who was not involved in the study. “Although it’s true we have done a lot of breeding for aesthetic traits, this work makes clear that a lot of the genetic action is in pathways related to the brain (and so presumably connected to behavior and cognition).” ...


https://www.scientificamerican.com/...lain-why-collies-are-different-from-terriers/
 
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