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A spate of articles on various aspects of the dog-origins question has brought requests for my reaction from readers who know of my interest in the subject—see How the Dog Became the Dog as well as past blog postings. I have usually responded personally but an article by Virginia Morell in the July issue of Scientific American has brought a new round of questions that require a more public response.
Much confusion has been generated by a comment in a PLoS Genetics paper by Harvard’s Adam Freedman, with John Novembre of the University of Chicago as senior author, suggesting that the progenitor of dogs cannot be found among wolves today. Some people have taken that as proof that dogs are descended not from gray wolves but from some other wolf-like canines.
That would not be a sound conclusion, according to Greger Larson, co-director of the international dog-domestication project and professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford University. The dog is from a lineage or lineages of gray wolf that no longer exist, he told me in a recent telephone conversation. Perhaps it transmogrified completely into dogs. Robert K. Wayne, an evolutionary biologist in whose laboratory at UCLA most of the genetic insights into early dogs have originated, believes the progenitor was the megafaunal wolf who, like human hunters and gatherers followed and preyed on migrating herds of horses, bison, and reindeer in the late Pleistocene.
Wayne said in a recent email that the megafaunal wolf probably constituted a distinct phenotype and ecotype but not a new species or subspecies of gray wolf. Wayne has said that his model for the megafaunal wolf is the tundra wolf who follows caribou along their twice annual migration. Their habit of following and watching over the herds has reminded some observers of shepherding. Migrating wolves apparently do not interbreed with resident wolves along their route and thereby gain genetic isolation of the sort required to create a new species or subspecies.
In the April 17, 2015 issue of Science, David Grimm announced that one part of the search for the origins of the dog was over because most researchers agreed on how the transformation of wolf to dog occurred. The online news editor of Science wrote: “Most experts now think dogs domesticated themselves. Early humans left piles of discarded carcasses at the edges of their campsites—a veritable feast, the thinking goes, for wolves that dared get close to people. Those wolves survived longer and produced more pups—a process that, generation by generation, yielded ever-bolder animals, until finally a wolf was eating out of a person’s hand. Once our ancestors realized the utility of these animals, they initiated a second, more active phase of domestication, breeding early canines to be better hunters, herders, and guardians.”
Presumably Grimm has surveyed the world’s experts on dog domestication and can equate ”most" to numbers and percentages, but I’ve not seen them. Even if hard figures on consensus did exist, it is important to recall the number of times “most of the ‘experts’” in any field have been wrong. What he or his unnamed expert sources have done is attempt to transfer the now discredited argument that a group of wolves feeding on the dumps of early agriculturalists liked the fare so much that natural selection began operating to make the population ever more tame, or docile and thus able to ingratiate themselves into human graces, like warm puppies. Being good sports willing to reward faithful servants with a swift kick to the arse or blow to the head, humans soon realized that their sniveling slave had numerous other talents, hunting and hauling and fighting and guarding, for example, and so began selectively breeding for those traits. Disregarding that scenario, Freedman in his paper stated that his work provided final proof that the dog predated the beginning of agriculture and so the consensus view of “most” experts was in need of revision. The model of domestication Grimm presents is in more need of revision than was the initial self-domestication theory.
For now, I’ll say only that from what we know, early modern humans of the late Pleistocene did not leave piles of carcasses on the edge of their encampments, partly because of the truly dangerous carnivores they might attract, who might then maraud through the camp if they found pickings too slim at the dump. Moreover, early modern humans were known to use nearly all parts of the animals they killed, including bone marrow and tendons.
In her Scientific American article, Virginia Morell claims that there are two main theories of dog domestication. The first is that humans would kill adult wolves and then capture and raise their pups who over time created camp-bred dogwolves—my word for doglike wolves. They ultimately became dogs. That theory at least has the advantage of bringing humans into the process. The alternative view, which she ascribes to Pat Shipman, author most recently of The Invaders, Bob Wayne, and Greger Larson, among others, sees dogs as descended from wolves who found in human encampments a new ecological niche to exploit. Unfortunately, Morell does not examine that line of thought before returning to camp garbage.
There are more than two theories, of course, but they are seldom mentioned in media accounts where the notion of dump-diving self-taming dogs has the standing of received wisdom, despite its obvious problems. Wayne himself has suggested that the megafaunal wolf might have scavenged human kill sites, but that proposal, which moves toward a more dynamic view of wolves and humans and their interactions is not found in these articles.
In my recent conversation with Larson, we discussed these and other theories of the transformation of wolves to dogs. He dismissed words like “domestication” because their meaning is imprecise and they suggest an outcome for something that had not occurred before. It is necessary to look at what happened in time—if possible—to see how the relationship began and has grown and changed as the two species have co-evolved, he said. Current explanations have flaws, he said, but some are more flawed than others.
We also talked about what I find a troubling subtext to the debate—that between humans and wolves is an innate, undying enmity. If that is the case, it certainly makes the transformation of wolf to dog a great and puzzling mystery. Why knowingly take into your yurt an animal who wants to eat you? As Larson says, there is no way to tell in advance that the carnivore at the dump or snorfling for food in your camps wants to be your friend—I’m sorry, but their friendship and trust must have come first, or they would have been unlikely to hang around.
In hope of understanding the notion that wolves routinely threaten and attack people, I recently asked Kira Cassidy, who studies Yellowstone National Park’s wolves how many attacks or threats toward humans had been recorded since their reintroduction in 1995. I wanted to get some idea of the threat these supposed stone-cold killers posed, while suspecting it was far less than the threat, their opponents posed to them. Cassidy replied that two wolves had been killed by Park officials because visitors had been feeding them and that is not permitted for fear the wolves, having lost their fear of humans will attack someone. By comparison, during the same period, bison have gored five tourists in Yellowstone. One wonders whether the bison were shot?
Larson insists that the historical record is one of persecution of wolves, who did attack and kill people on a regular basis, or they would dig up human graves, and that proves the case for innate enmity. Wolves were extirpated from the British Isles by the 18th century and most of Northern Europe by the late 19th century. Deprived of their native prey, their pack structures shattered by hunting, wolves turned to livestock, often protected by big guard dogs who were part wolf themselves. Agriculture with its various systems of involuntary servitude was the problem for humans and wolves. Persecution of wolves in the American West in the 19th Century was part of the slaughter of native fauna in the advance of “civilization.” Yet along the frontier, until the late 19th century, it was not uncommon to see long hunters with wolf companions or Native American dogs who closely resembled wolves. It is often difficult to distinguish dog from wolf attacks; jn fact, many reported wolf attacks might well have been made by free-ranging dogs.
The point is that not everyone fears and hates wolves—not everyone likes them either—and the same applies to our domestic wolves. Not everyone treats them well, nor are thy always subservient and solicitous, which is why in the U.S. alone, there are 30 to 35 dog-related fatalities a year and thousands of dog bites requiring hospitalization. That seems a small number compared with the number of dogs in America—unless you are the one bitten.
People who like wolves and other animals are more likely to have played a role in the transformation of wolf to dog—if only because they would have engaged rather than driven them off or killed them.
We have learned, for example, that wolves will live among us if we don’t hunt them. That is the lesson from Europe and America. We also have abundant evidence that bold wolves who manage their flight response from the new or “other” and give rein to their innate curiosity are the ones who take food from humans. If Paleolithic hunters and gatherers had shared our view that such behavior was dangerous, they would have killed or driven the wolves from their camps and with them any chance of the dog arising.
Fortunately, they did not. Rather, as they colonized the human niche, wolves entered into a co-evolutionary dance with humans that over millennia has changed both. Wolfgang Schleidt and Michael Shalter proposed a theory of the co-evolution of wolves and humans in a 2003 paper in the journal Cognition and Evolution. They suggested that humans learned how to hunt cooperatively and strategically from wolves. I have suggested ways in which wolves and humans have similar social systems that make it relatively easy to understand each other and collaborate.
Where, then, do we stand today. We know that the dog split from a population or populations of wolves before the last glacial maximum. After that split, wolves and dogs continued to interbreed, in some places for thousands of years.
We know that dogs arose on the trail with hunters and gatherers and began to evolve with them in ways that are still being played out. Beyond that, much is suspected, but little is known about the origins of the dog.
