(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Skull of "one of the world's first dogs" found.

About 33,000 years old, the fossil's DNA shows it's closer to dog than wolf.

Comments

[anivair.livejournal.com]

Not a huge shock, IMO. We co-evolved as species and it doesn't take long to take most any wild animals and breed it to a domestic version. You just breed for friendliness and the physical traits seem to come (though WHICH traits probably vary wildly from species to species).

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Not too surprising. There are several theories that discount the idea that homo sapiens went out into the forest and caught wolves to tame.

The idea is that dogs auto-domesticated. They didn't come from hunter stock; they were scavengers that would live off human scraps and leavings. In that way, they became accustomed to human behavior long before some human got the idea to start teaching them tricks.

[jerril]

Or to look at it another way, domestic dogs were domesticated from a species of parasite/mutualist which is in turn descended from wolves.

Think like oxpeckers and large ungulates - oxpeckers manage to avoid being attacked by the big ungulates despite occasionally taking a chomp out of their hosts, and don't really do anything productive about the level of parasites on their hosts. On the other hand, they may provide a little passive protection as an extra set of eyes on the situation and while they may not put much of a dent in the tick population, the scale of their contribution is still up for debate.

But instead of ticks and botflies (and the occasional predatory nip out of a wound) you get proto-dogs eating garbage and stealing the occasional bit of dinner or useful bone or leather tool. Proto-dogs wouldn't strictly domesticated - "accustomed to human behaviour" is "tame", not "domesticated", but self-taming is a HUGE first step.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

There was a fascinating 'Horizon' documentary on the BBC a few years ago where they looked at some work done in Russia in the 1950s on domesticating the Silver Fox. Basically if you were aggressive about breeding for docile behaviour you end up with something that looks and behaves like a dog in about 8 generations - the change in appearance was one of the most striking things as it happened fairly quickly, in terms of the foxes looking more, well, doggy and fluffy.

I suspect that dogs spent a while hanging around with humans, and eventually somebody worked out that they'd be great at waking them up if there were problems and the rest is history.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'd be really surprised if we don't find ones older. Humans took dogs to Australia with them and I'm fairly sure that the Dingo is as native to Australia as Homo Sapiens, all of which happened longer than 33,000 years ago.

There's been some recent data suggesting dogs are only 15,000 years or so old, and other studies suggesting 10 times that.

I suspect the longer time frame is more likely.