Dogs: Part II - Wolves and Domestication

A little over a month ago, I posted an OT which was about dogs and some aspects of their domestication. It was called 'Dogs, Dogs, Dogs - Wow' and was Part I of this short series.

Here's Part II. This post is about that same book (Dogs, Past and Present: An Interdisciplinary Perspective). This post covers a very tiny bit of section I of the book on dog genetics and more.

The Wolf's Family Portrait by Rodney L. Honeycutt from Wikipedia

Zoologists today agree that the dog is descended from the wolf. The dog is also humankind's first domesticated animal. Domestication is defined as evolution which was/is 'largely the result of artificial selection by people with natural selection playing a somewhat less important role.' (from the forward by Simon JM Davis to the book linked above). Domestication has given rise to the vast array of dog breeds and the myriad of ways dogs function in human society.

Chapter 1.1 of the book, by Carles Vilà and Jennifer A. Leonard, discusses the domestication of dogs from a molecular viewpoint. One of their basic conclusions is that the dog derived from the wolf about 27,000 years ago.

It's hard to differentiate the first domesticated dogs and wolves archaeologically, because the first changes during the domestication of the dog were probably in color, ear shape, etc and, of course, behavior. None of those things are preserved in the archaeological record until dogs are given careful burials and honored in other ways by humans. Also, it took time for the dogs' skeletons to change from that of the wolves', to grow smaller, with different sized teeth and so on, so the early domestication of dogs, and the date thereof, is not really certain. Still, dogs were the first domesticated animal, that much is certain, and that domestication was probably about 27,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years.

The dog is related, of course, to the other canids, like the wolf, coyote, jackal, dhole, ethiopian wolf and so on. They all split, at different times, from the precursor, the wolf-like canid line. The line which gave rise to the dog, the gray wolf, the coyote, and the golden jackal split from other canids about 3-4 million years ago (see figure 1, page 9, in the book). It's interesting that these animals can interbreed and hybridize even now.

Several different lineages of wolves, at least 4, gave rise to dogs (figure 2, page 10). Because of this it is possible, indeed probable, that different groups of wolves were domesticated in different areas and times to become dogs. In other words, dogs arose multiple times (at least 4 times). Genetic sequence analysis shows that the first group of dogs which evolved from wolves did so long before finds of domestic dogs appear in the archaeological record.

Ohh, the coyote deviated from the wolf/dog line well before dogs did. The coyote is the closest related canid to wolves and dogs, and, of course as mentioned above, they can all interbreed. When my dog, Jaska, was young, perhaps a year or so old if that, a coyote ventured onto the farm during the day. The coyote and Jaska had been 'talking' to each other for weeks before that with barks, calls, howls, 'pee-mail' (as hubby and I call canid scent marking), and more. Jaska wasn't happy that the coyote was on the farm fields but she didn't seem to know if it was an enemy or not. The coyote didn't seem to know that about her, either. They met in the field (hubby and I watched this from afar), sniffed at each other, circled, then decided they didn't like each other. Coyote was bigger than Jaska, just a bit, and tried to overpower her. But by that time hubby and I were running into the field, shouting. Jaska saw us, got even braver and chased the coyote into the neighboring fields... which were full of cows. Boy, did that coyote fly into the air when the cows slammed into it with their heads! Coyote ran off, and Jaska has disliked coyotes since then.

Dogs were in the Americas when Europeans arrived. They almost certainly were already domesticated and came from Siberia with humans when humans first populated the Americas. Interestingly enough, the dogs that were present before Europeans arrived interbred with the European dogs and their genetics disappeared, at least in purebred dogs. Or perhaps canine diseases, which came with the European dogs, caused or helped cause this disappearance. Dogs were in Australia when the Europeans arrived as well.

Dogs can eat more carbs than wolves. This is another aspect, or maybe the original aspect, of their domestication. Perhaps wolf-like dogs, which had a slightly greater tolerance to carbs in their diet, were able to hang around with humans and eat human food. Certainly, they can now.

In conclusion, I'll mention that there's an anthropologist named David Ian Howe who is working on the dog-human connections (ethnocynology), and how dogs changed humans as well as how humans changed dogs, in the past and in the present. Here's his website, if interested!

Have a dogolicious Thursday and thanks for reading. Here's the open thread - and remember, everything is interesting if you dive deep enough, so tell us about where you're diving!