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How wolves became dogs

economist.com

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Re: How wolves became dogs

#41

Post by tastyfreeze »

feintruled wrote: post #38

Interesting article, though is there really much new there? Also it discounts the alternative hypothesis of some bright spark acquiring wolf pups and doing it purposefully because that would take 'weeks'. Weeks, you say? Surely some enterprising hunter-gatherer had sufficient time on their hands. I can't help but think strutting around with a feared predator at your beck and call would have been the ultimate status s…

I see this as likely as becoming more amenable to humans over a long time due to free food.

Falconers often acquire and train wild birds. With wolves abducting pups or adopting orphans seems like a reasonable path to domestication.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#42

Post by IAmBroom »

HPsquared wrote: post #21
sph wrote: post #9

It's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs. A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has human society in any way been affected by the structure of wolf packs? Did hairless monkeys form stronger tribes because of it? I don't believe for a second that this deep interspecies friendship has been one-sided and hasn't brought psychological if not physical…

This is where evolutionary theory can be viewed through the lens of coevolution or group selection (a group defined as containing both a selection of humans, and also animals and plants in varying degrees of domestication, as a whole system). This is in contrast to kin selection, which only accounts for genetic relatedness. I remember in one of Jiang Xueqin's videos, he made the interesting argument that "grain domes…

Grains aren't very good food until bread is invented (probably from sprouted grains, originally). Seeds are designed to keep their goodness inside, and are very good at that containment. Bread in turn requires cooking. (I wonder now if there was a brief period of surviving on raw sprouted grains... which are far inferior because they mold so quickly.)

Wisdom teeth are far more valuable to a precooking human, who has to chew constantly to break down plant cells. The extra chewing causes stress that induces the jaw to grow longers, allowing space for the wisdome teeth.

We're basically at the "awkward teenage" part of evolving past raw-food diets.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#43

Post by IAmBroom »

steve1977 wrote: post #37
sph wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if cat-people and dog-people don't intermingle. But given how hostile many cat-people are (see sibling comment), compared to dog-people which tend to also enjoy the company of cats, I can imagine a timeline where this misanthropist branch of humans splits off, goes to live in trees and hisses at anybody that comes nearby.

> goes to live in trees Mainly because they lost the ability to climb down.

A symbiotic relationship with Homo caniphilus firemen, then?

Re: How wolves became dogs

#44

Post by jamiecurle »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #36
sjw987 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. When confronted about leaving the bagged dog shit somewhere they always say they're going to pick it up on the way back, yet the next day it's still there. Modern British dog owners are incredibly irresponsible surrounding how they look after their pets and how they handle the pets mess. Covid made it measurably worse.

> In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. That's wild. I've never once seen this in the US. Obviously there are people who just don't clean up after their dogs in the first place, but to clean it up and then hang the bagged crap on a tree? Haha.

They do it a lot. My garden backs onto a public woodland and I can confirm it happens. Last summer when I tidied up out the back of my house, I found at least five years worth of buried dog turds in bags. Cleaning it up was not fun. I used a backpack blower to blow it all into line of "turd shame" away from the houses.

It looks a lot nicer out there now and I gave the trees a little prune (I'm a qualified arborist) so people know this is a "tidy area" and so far no more turds in bags.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#45

Post by pokstad »

conductr wrote: post #23
sph wrote: post #9

It's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs. A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has human society in any way been affected by the structure of wolf packs? Did hairless monkeys form stronger tribes because of it? I don't believe for a second that this deep interspecies friendship has been one-sided and hasn't brought psychological if not physical…

On a long enough timeline it’s possible that cat-people and dog-people evolve separately into different species

I watched a documentary on dogs that was cheerful until the last 5% when they mentioned modern day dog owners. The film speculated that dogs might be a considered like a parasite that infiltrates human families and causes them to stop breeding humans and instead only have dogs and cats. So if that’s the case, the evolution ends for us :)

Re: How wolves became dogs

#46

Post by deadbabe »

sph wrote: post #9

It's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs. A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has human society in any way been affected by the structure of wolf packs? Did hairless monkeys form stronger tribes because of it? I don't believe for a second that this deep interspecies friendship has been one-sided and hasn't brought psychological if not physical…

Misconceptions about wolf pack hierarchical structures have led humans to come up with misguided perceptions of being an Alpha, Beta, Sigma, etc…

Re: How wolves became dogs

#47

Post by mooreds »

jebarker wrote: post #24

Highly recommend the book "How to tame a fox" about the Russian fur farm fox domestication experiment

But see also https://www.the-scientist.com/famous-fox-domestication-exper...

> Famous Fox Domestication Experiment Challenged

> The tamed foxes, whose appearances changed with breeding, weren’t wild to begin with, say the authors of a new study.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#48

Post by tyjen »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #36
sjw987 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. When confronted about leaving the bagged dog shit somewhere they always say they're going to pick it up on the way back, yet the next day it's still there. Modern British dog owners are incredibly irresponsible surrounding how they look after their pets and how they handle the pets mess. Covid made it measurably worse.

> In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. That's wild. I've never once seen this in the US. Obviously there are people who just don't clean up after their dogs in the first place, but to clean it up and then hang the bagged crap on a tree? Haha.

I've never seen it in a tree, but I do see some owners leaving their crap bags on hiking trails and often forgetting about them on the return trip. I'd rather they let the dog poop in the forest instead of encapsulating it in a plastic bag until a Good Samaritan picks it up.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#50

Post by suzzer99 »

z3t4 wrote: post #11

It's common in fur farms that they breed the animals that are most friendly to humans, and in only a few generations those animals behave like very friendly pets, and killing them becomes more difficult.

A NOVA episode on dogs showed a Russian study where they bred the most friendly foxes with each other and did the same with the most aggressive (so extremes in both directions). The aggressive-bred animals were like that scene in I Am Legend where he checks on his infected rats. They were being fed, and they still wanted to kill their feeders. Kind of terrifying.
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