re: #357 freetoken

I’ve not kept pets as an adult, and am not particularly fond of dogs.

The domestication of the dog is interesting, because recently it has been shown that domestic dogs truly are descended from wolves. Who was the first person to decide to adopt a wolf? Was it a pup?

I adore dogs.

There’s been a lot of theorizing about how dogs were domesticated. My sixth-graders read a novel called “Maroo of the Winter Caves”, which is an adventure story about a stone-age family. The children find an orphaned puppy, and convince their parents to let them keep it by reminding them of a man they met at a tribal gathering who had a tame dog that helped him hunt. Some scholars theorize that it might have happened like that, puppies being taken in, or a lone wolf deciding to form an alliance with a human it ran across.

They also think it might have happened over a long period of time, as human hunters attracted scavengers to their camps. The piece of research I find most interesting is one that looks into the fact that apparently, out of all the world, only humans and domestic dogs understand pointing. Wolves don’t, and chimps don’t.

They theorized it might have something to do with how wolves were domesticated, so they worked for years with Siberian foxes. They brought the foxes in, and the only test for being in the program was that a researcher stuck and hand in the cage with them. If the animal attacked, it was out. If it showed fear, it was out. If it sniffed the hand, or seemed calm, it was in.

Then they mated the calm foxes with each other, and repeated the process.

Forty generations later (foxes have a short breeding cycle), they had foxes that were easily tamed, human-friendly, and understood pointing.

The suspicion is that we essentially did something like that with dogs, less intentionally and over a long period of time.