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The dog is one of the most extraordinary animal on our planet because it has been able to adapt to the human presence, making its way, not only into our houses and on our sofas, but also into our hearts.

As a result of the human civilisation expansion there has been a considerable population reduction of most of the animals on the planet. Instead, dogs today are so many that is usually necessary to take precaution against their breeding to reduce the problem of straying.

The friendship between man and dog is the result of a symbiotic coevolution started with our ancestors: the modern human and the wolf.

The process that made the wolf into a dog is called “Domestication”. This phenomenon is so complex that to better understand it we need to know the difference between a tamed animal and an addomesticated one.

A tamed animal is an animal that looses its fear of humans (e.g. a wolf fed by a human) or that never develops it (e.g. a wolf raised by a human since puppyhood). On the other hand if these individuals are not afraid of humans, they are always wary of strangers. This has been shown by an experiment on a group of silver foxes that were bred for their fur in Siberia. Generation after generation they were exposed to human contact but between the first generation foxes and the last geneation ones there hasn’t been any morfological, psycological or behavioral change.

As a result of a domestication process there are instead changes at a genetic level (infact wolves and dogs only share 99,8% of the DNA) that result in morfological, psycolgical and behavioral changes that can be passed on throughout the generations.

Morfological changes in canids result in a smaller skull, shorter and wider muzzle, smaller and more gathered teeth, different sizes (leading to giant and dwarfs breeds), different coat lenghts, splotchy coats, floppy ears, curly tail, loss of skin pigmentation, more frequent heats.

Psycological changes result into the understanding of human gesture and the comunicative intention behind it in a similar way infants do. This skill evolves from the one that the animals already have that allows them to understand each other body language.

Behavioral changes are many but the most important one result in the complete loss of fear of humans, even strangers, in the well socialised individuals.

Over time different theories about the domestication of dogs have been proposed. Archeological evidence suggests that everything started somewhere between 40.000 and 12.000 years ago. In the human evolution chart the Neanderthals were facing extinction handing over the humanity’s destiny to the modern human (Homo Sapiens).

One of the theories suggests that humans adopted wolf puppies with the intention of taming them and they became domesticated over time. Another theory suggests that at some point in the history humans and wolves bagan hunting together for a reciprocal advantage. But thinking over the process, none of these theories really makes sense for more than one reason.

In the first case our ancestors had no idea that a physical or behavioral trait could be passed on to the next generation, let alone that after generations they could succede to create something useful for humans such a completely new species: the dog. Meanwhile they would raise a wolf  that is still wild and that at some point could have killed a child. That would have been an hazard too big!

The second theory  doesn’t make sense either because modern humans were extremely skilled in making tools with animal horns and bones. They also invented the bow. This very invention allowed our ancestors to hunt from a safe distance and even kill with one shot only. All this increased the survival of the hunters and, consequentely, of their families. On top of that modern humans had previously drove to extintion some of the competition for food resource such as the Neanderthals, that went extinct by interbreeding and climate changes, and larger animals like the Panthera leo splelaea (a larger lion) and the saber-toothed cat. It’s clear that our ancestors didn’t rally need any help hunting. However there is another reason for this theory not to be true. Having wolves helping during the hunts would have meant to share the kill with them. And not only wolves require a lot of meat to survive, but they are also famous for not been good at sharing. There is usually a lot of fussing and biting between wolves around the kill and if that’s harmless for a wolf, can be a bigger issue for a human.

However, to be true, both of the theories have to imply that, at some point along the road, wolves and humans learned to tolerate each other proximity. And that is something that never happend! Come to think of it, wolves still avoid humans as much as they can and, in the last centuries, humans to protect their cattle have driven to extinction whole populations of wolves all over the world. Wolves have infact completely disappered from Japan, France, England, Scotland and 48 North American states with a recent reintroduction of a small group into the Yellowstone National Park, Idaho. What really happened then?

The brilliant anthropologist Brian Hare has given us the answer. Thinking about the modern human’s lifestyle he realised that the waste, that at the time of the first villages became available, was more important for wolves than we thought. Even if the waste is a low quality food, wolves finded it easier to obtain and a more stable resource than hunting preys.

Wolves could smell the waste from 2-3 km distance but only the ones with low level of cortisol (the stress hormone) were less afraid of humans and got closer to the villges to scavenge. At first they would have done it at night with the cover of the dark. Some of them would have been seen by humans. The most aggressive ones would have attacked and were killed. Some other would have run away (the ones with lower cortisol level) and if they were lucky enough not to be killed by an arrow, they would have produced an offspring. The new generation would have inherited their parents traits. The waste, as a more stable resource, would have allowed more of these new kind of wolves, or proto-dogs, to better survive and moltiplicate. At this point many proto-dogs would have started to look more like dogs and less like wolves. With all the traits that followed the early stages of domestication, there were two particularly important: proto-dogs, as dogs today, would have started to prefere human proximity over the one to other wolves and would have started to bark when aroused. Sporadix proximity to the villages became then more and more frequent to the point that proto-dogs were always close.

Humans learned to tollerate them because they barked when a stranger or a wild animal got too close to the villages, working as an alarm system. Over the time proto-dogs became less aggressive ( result of human involuntary selection) and they started to be tolerated inside the villages.

When the fear of humans disappeared, proto-dogs were able to concentrate on human gestures and they bacame better at reading it. Our ancestors then tought of taking them during the hunts to help them traking preys (they were more incline to share the kill because much less aggressive than a wolf).

Shortly after, humans started to use proto-dogs to protect their cattle.

Without knowing it, our ancestors started selecting the individual with the better skills for a specific task and created the firsts specialised dogs: guard dogs, hund dogs, and hearding dogs.

Just recently, during the last centuries, when humanity comprehended the natural selection mechanism , humans started intentionally breeding, giving birth to all the wanderful and different breeds that we all know and love.

Source: The Genius of Dogs, Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods.

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