Wolves eat a lot of meat, as much as one deer per ten wolves every day—a lot for humans to feed or compete against. And anyone who has seen wolves in a feeding frenzy knows that wolves don't like to share.
Humans have a long history of eradicating wolves, rather than trying to adopt them. Over the last few centuries, almost every culture has hunted wolves to extinction. The first written record of the wolf's persecution was in the sixth century B. In Scotland, the forested landscape made wolves more difficult to kill.
In response, the Scots burned the forests. North American wolves were not much better off. By , there was not a wolf left in the 48 contiguous states of America. See " Wolf Wars. If this is a snapshot of our behavior toward wolves over the centuries, it presents one of the most perplexing problems: How was this misunderstood creature tolerated by humans long enough to evolve into the domestic dog?
The short version is that we often think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. But essentially, far from the survival of the leanest and meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest. Most likely, it was wolves that approached us, not the other way around, probably while they were scavenging around garbage dumps on the edge of human settlements.
The wolves that were bold but aggressive would have been killed by humans, and so only the ones that were bold and friendly would have been tolerated. Friendliness caused strange things to happen in the wolves. They started to look different. Domestication gave them splotchy coats, floppy ears, wagging tails.
In only several generations, these friendly wolves would have become very distinctive from their more aggressive relatives. But the changes did not just affect their looks. Changes also happened to their psychology. These protodogs evolved the ability to read human gestures. As dog owners, we take for granted that we can point to a ball or toy and our dog will bound off to get it.
But the ability of dogs to read human gestures is remarkable. Even our closest relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—can't read our gestures as readily as dogs can. Dogs are remarkably similar to human infants in the way they pay attention to us. This ability accounts for the extraordinary communication we have with our dogs. Some dogs are so attuned to their owners that they can read a gesture as subtle as a change in eye direction.
With this new ability, these protodogs were worth knowing. People who had dogs during a hunt would likely have had an advantage over those who didn't.
With which co-author Rui Diogo agreed: "I must admit that I was surprised to see the results myself because the gross anatomy of muscles is normally very slow to change in evolution, and this happened very fast indeed, in just some dozens of thousands of years.
What evolutionary changes might this unique partnership bring about in another 33, years? And can we please have talking dogs someday? The whole study and video clips of wolves versus dogs! Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.
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Accessories Buying Guides How-tos Deals. Health Energy Environment. YouTube Instagram Adobe. Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. Fortnite Game of Thrones Books. Comics Music. Filed under: Report Science Fossils. Prehistoric fossils suggest modern dogs evolved from a single population of wolves New, 3 comments.
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Linkedin Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. This dog cranium was discovered in Germany in , next to Neolithic human remains. The skull is about 4, years old.
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