Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz Read Free Book Online Page A

mitochondrial DNA samples,* of a subtle split as long as 145,000 years ago between pure wolves and those that were to become dogs. We could call the latter wolves protodomesticators, since they had themselves changed behaviorally in ways that would later encourage humans' interest (or merely tolerance) of them. By the time humans came along, they might have been ripe for domesticating. The wolves taken up by humans were probably less hunters than scavengers, less dominant and smaller than alpha wolves, and tamer. In sum, less wolfy. Thus, early in the development of ancient civilizations, thousands of years before domesticating any other animal, humans took this one animal with them inside the walls of their fledgling villages.
    These vanguard dogs would not be mistaken as members of one of the hundreds of currently recognized dog breeds. The short stature of the dachshund, the flattened nose of the pug—these are the results of selective breeding by humans much later. Most dog breeds we recognize today have only been developed in the last few hundred years. But these early dogs would have inherited the social skills and curiosity of their wolf ancestors, and would then have applied them toward cooperating with and appeasing humans as much as toward each other. They lost some of their tendency toward pack behavior: scavengers don't need the proclivity to hunt together. Nor is any hierarchy relevant when you might live and eat on your own. They were sociable but not in a social hierarchy.
    The change from wolf to dog was striking in its speed. Humans took nearly two million years to morph from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens, but the wolf leapfrogged into dogness in a fraction of the time. Domestication mirrors what nature, through natural selection, does over hundreds of generations: a kind of artificial selection that hurries up the clock. Dogs were the first domesticated animals, and in some ways the most surprising. Most domestic animals are not predators. A predator seems like an unwise choice to take into one's home: not only would it be difficult to find provisions for a meat eater, one risks being seen as meat oneself. And though this might make them (and has made them) good hunting pals, their main role in the last hundred years has been to be a friend and nonjudgmental confidant, not a worker.
    But wolves do have features that made them terrific candidates for artificial selection. The process favors a social animal who is behaviorally flexible, able to adjust its behavior in different settings. Wolves are born into a pack, but only stay until they are a few years old: then they leave and find a mate, create a new pack, or join an already existing pack. This kind of flexibility to changing status and roles is well suited to dealing with the new social unit that includes humans. Within a pack or moving between packs, wolves would need to be attentive to the behavior of packmates—just as dogs will need to be attentive to their keepers and sensitive to their behavior. Those early wolf-dogs meeting early human settlers would not have benefited the humans much, so they must have been valued for some other reason—say, for their companionship. The openness of these canids allowed them to adjust to a new pack: one that would include animals of an entirely different species.

    UNWOLFY

    And so some wolflike ancestor of both wolves and dogs took the plunge, loitered among human loiterers, and was eventually adopted and then molded by humans instead of solely by the caprice of nature. This makes present-day wolves an interesting comparison species to dogs: they likely share many traits. The present-day wolf is not the ancestor of the dog; though wolves and dogs share a common ancestor. Even the modern wolf is likely quite different than the ancestral wolves. What is different between dogs and wolves is probably due to what made some protodogs likely to be taken in, plus whatever humans have done in breeding them since.
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