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How wolves became dogs

economist.com

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Re: How wolves became dogs

#51

Post by Beijinger »

Previously: Our dogs' diversity can be traced back to the Stone Age https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922997

Me: Not sure man. The closest relative to the dog is the likely extinct, Japanese Wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wolf Maybe they were very tame to begin with? Like the extinct Falkland wolf:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_wolf

"There were no forests for the animal to hide in, and it had no fear of humans;[citation needed] it was possible to lure the animal with a chunk of meat held in one hand, and kill it with a knife held in the other"

Re: How wolves became dogs

#52

Post by runjake »

IAmBroom wrote: post #40
szanni wrote: post #12

I am rather surprised the article does not mention the shared hunting technique of pursuing prey until exhaustion as a possible link. Many hunter gather tribes apparently employed this technique and it can still be found today in Africa with the San people. Sharing food or stealing wolf puppies were probably part of the domestication but was this because humans possibly hunted alongside wolves? Humans possibly being…

Interesting. Counterpoint: since the canines can't keep up with the humans, are they only used to start the hunt? How do they know where the humans are near the end? Until the dog is fully domesticated (OK, I'll go home and await his return. He'll bring me meat!), I don't know how they could cooperate on a many-hour hunt like this. I used to wonder the same about falconry until I met a hawkmaster. The animals don't t…

> Counterpoint: since the canines can't keep up with the humans, are they only used to start the hunt?

Can you elaborate here? This is a weird fascination of mine (man+canine).

I walk long distances with dogs, here's what I've found and ruminated:

1. If I chase or follow a dog, I can chase them to exhaustion.

2. If I'm walking several miles with a dog, they tend to trot ahead of me and stop and pant and wait for me. Rinse, wash, repeat. Bursted energy/rest cycles.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#54

Post by SJC_Hacker »

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 find this no less as unlikely as thinking humans would let wolves help themselves to their excess food

Wolves can extract nutrition from animal tissue which humans discard, such as bone and the tougher cartilage/connective tissue. Modern dogs still absolute love bones.

They also have much better night vision than humans, sense of smell and hearing.

So, follow human tribes and pick off the remains when they move camp. Maybe eventually escalate to sneaking in at night. The human tribes now become a "resource" which the wolves will start guarding from other predators, such as bears or competing wolf packs. The humans eventually catch on that the wolves are providing a benefit at very little cost - food remains which they are not eating anyway. They even start to share kills - the wolves being better at tracking game while the humans finish the kill with spear/bow.

When animal and crop domestication occurs, you get another benefit - protecting the flocks/herds/crops from marauders. Especially at night.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#55

Post by dkarl »

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…

I think the "wheat domesticated humans" argument is about changes to our behavior, our culture and social structures, rather than genetic change. It isn't domestication in the evolutionary sense. It would be like keeping zebras on a farm with horses and doing your best to tame and train them. You might be able to change their behavior so that they behaved differently from wild zebras, but it wouldn't be domestication unless you bred them over generations to produce a population that was genetically different from wild zebras.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#56

Post by conductr »

thebruce87m wrote: post #25
conductr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think some dog people already are a different species - hanging bags of dog shit on trees would never occur to me for example. I’d hate to see what their Christmas trees look like.

This seems normal to me. I've never done it or even seen it - but it seems everyone exercises a slightly personalized disregard for the very society they are a part of these days

Re: How wolves became dogs

#57

Post by inahga »

MichaelRo wrote: post #18

>> “The only, absolute and best friend a man has, in this selfish world, the only one that will not betray or deny him, is his dog.” Well, this is far from absolute, isn't it? :) There's a fair number of vicious attacks of a dog on his owner. Oftentimes pitbulls (are they even dogs or rather "creatures"?!), but other breeds do it too. So ... nothing is absolute :P

Mostly, if not entirely due to intentionally poor breeding practices. Who betrayed who?

Re: How wolves became dogs

#58

Post by omoikane »

xnorswap wrote: post #8
k8sToGo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the how dropped? Is it automatic?

Yes. There are a few other title-mangle rules that HN has. It's an attempted technical solution to try to remove / limit the amount of "clickbait" in titles. It does not work very well.

I tried searching for similar incidents in the past[1], and I think the problem is that the title munging actually doesn't happen often enough for Hacker News to want to do anything about it. It's unusual that two front page articles were affected on the same day, but that's a small fraction compared to titles that passed through[2].

I don't know if Hacker News will pop up any extra confirmation to the submitter to warn that their submitted title were automatically edited, but I think that would be a better interface than relying on submitters and readers to fix the mistake after the article is already visible and ranked.

Whether any automated editing of titles actually helps with reducing clickbait is a different question.

[1]

How wolves became dogs (2026-01-09) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553433

How Samba Was Written (2026-01-04) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551531

Why I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky (2025-12-19) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46327832

How they clean the balls in a ball pit (2025-10-15) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45592984

Why we didn't rewrite our feed handler in Rust (2025-10-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517240

How Spain put up wealth taxes (2025-08-16) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44927460

[2]

Majority of the submitted titles never had "how" or "why" to begin with, and sometimes the submitter catches the change in time, for example:

How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code (2026-01-08) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620

I didn't see any mentions of the title being edited here.

Re: How wolves became dogs

#59

Post by griffzhowl »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #22

I watch the genetic studies and it seems always presumed, in these articles, that dogs derive from wolves, not that dogs derive from siblings of wolves that derive from a common proto-canine ancestor. The wikipedia entry considers the issue, presents data that are curious with respect ot the data in the Economist article, saying domestication is presumed from wolves roughly 14,000 years or so ago. https://en.wikipedi…

The wiki article doesn't say domestication occurred roughly 14k years ago, it says at least 14k years ago, because that's the earliest definitive evidence of a domesticated dog. Here are the next two sentences from the wiki article:

"The remains of the Bonn–Oberkassel dog, buried alongside humans between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago, are the earliest to be conclusively identified as a domesticated dog.[9][7] Genetic studies show that dogs likely diverged from wolves between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago."

Re: How wolves became dogs

#60

Post by TacticalCoder »

dsign wrote: post #32
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…

Slightly tangential, but I think that dogs have allowed for some bad things to happen to us. Like, they are available physically, so if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person (your one and only partner), you can get a dog or five, or simply pet your friend’s dog or even a neighbor’s. Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations pre…

> ... if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person ...

There are animals where the male and female only ever live together and are loyal (and not for the sake of the idea of loyalty, they're animals). It's not something speficic to some human societies.

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