“Revealed: The Surprising Self-Driven Evolution of Wolves into Dogs—Were They the Real Architects of Their Own Domestication?”
“I don’t think it is a likely scenario that ancient hunters would have worked alongside predators who would be at best more likely to view them as competitors than partners of any kind,” Kathryn Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in Worchester, who was not involved in the study, told National Geographic.
Wikimedia CommonsAn ancient petroglyph depicting a Hawaiian Poi Dog.
Perhaps, some have suggested, ancient humans inadvertently created a population of tamer wolves when they took some in as pups and raised them in human communities. Or, maybe our ancestors recognized the potential of canine hunting companions and kicked off the process on purpose.
The other side of the debate, meanwhile, suggests that wolves initiated the domestication process themselves.
Drawn to discarded food scraps left at ancient human settlements, certain groups of wild wolves acted as scavengers, setting aside their aggression in exchange for easy meals. These tamer wolves would have naturally isolated themselves from more aggressive packs and mated with wolves of the same tameness, thus resulting in a self-domestication process that took place over thousands of years.
But could this process of natural selection really have occurred over such a short (in evolutionary terms) period of time? According to the new models, it’s certainly possible.
How New Mathematical Models Support The Theory That Dogs Domesticated Themselves
Wikimedia CommonsA pack of wolves pursuing an elk.
Without human intervention to speed up the domestication process, critics have argued, it would take far too long for wolves to have self-selected the genetic traits that eventually led to speciation — the formation of a new, separate dog species — over the given timeline. Up until now, though, no one had actually tried to apply mathematical modeling.
Post Comment