"Watch this video and based on what you've seen, take some notes summarizing the main information in it, and send them to me."
The video is:
It is a ten minute long video and I did not find it particularly easy to follow.
It just throws a lot of information and sometimes it just does not follow a straight temporal line, which confuses me no end!
In any case, here following are my notes.
It seems that in the summer of 2018 somewhere in Siberia, in some permafrost that had just melted, they found a puppy almost perfectly preserved. It turns out that the puppy was about 18,000 years old.
But scientists were not sure if it was a dog puppy or a wolf puppy.
There is still a lot to be learnt about how wolfs went from predator to man's best friend. When and where did it happen? And what did the process look like in terms of genetics?
Most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of man-wolf interaction for the process of domestication to complete.
The dog (Canis lupus familiaris) and the Grey wolf (Canis lupus lupus) share an common ancestor not too far distant in time, but the exact species of that common ancestor is still unknown.
What we know is that dog and wolf starting to genetically diverge sometime between 40000 and 27000 years ago.
One genetic trait that wolves and dogs share seems to be hyper-sociability, the tendency for adult animals to initiate social contact intra and extra species. That trait is probably what made wolves a good fit for domestication.
As humans spread they became more interesting to wolves mostly because of the resources they had. This is known as The Commensal Pathway to domestication. Wolves viewed human settlements as a good place to hang around and get an easy meal from the discarded food of humans.
Eventually humans realise that wolves could be useful as guards and hunting partners and even help with the domestication of other animal species.
So soon after that, wherever humans went, their new canine friends followed.
There is a correlation between the spread of agriculture and a genetic trait in early dogs, an adaptation that allowed them to better digest more starchy foods associated with the development of agriculture.
There was some debate as to whether the dog was domesticated in two places, Europe and Asia namely, but some recent studies sort of show that the domestication happened only once, with the genetic divergence between European and Asian dogs coming afterwards.
While scientists are still trying to figure out when and where domestication happened, it seems clear that it did not take that long for humans to get really attached to their new friends. At least that is what the archeological burial sites seem to suggest, with plenty of examples of dog burials dotted around the world.
New breeds of dogs were developed to meet the needs of humans. Cross breeding and hibridisation were used to create those new breeds, with most of the modern breeds dating from recent centuries, specially the XIX with the introduction of dog shows.
To quickly summarise:
Wolves were originally drawn to humans for food, and a bond quickly developed between humans and the canines with them even adapting to the new human ways.
But the origins of the relationship are complicated and difficult to unravel.
We are still waiting to find out de DNA results from that Siberian frozen puppy, with the hope that it might shed some light on the early stages of domestication.
All we really know is the dog has been man's best friend for a very long time!
Comments
Post a Comment