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intriguing hypothesis: "Y Modern Wolves R Poor Models For Dog Domestication"

2K views 12 replies 6 participants last post by  Moonstream 
#1 ·
intriguing hypothesis: "Y Modern Wolves R Poor Models For Dog Domestication"



http://wp.me/phvWb-9W1

brief synopsis -
the Coppingers theorize that dogs weren't the result of kidnapping & rearing wolf-pups, then culling aggro or timid offspring & allowing human-affiliative progeny to breed -
they think that wolves who scavenged human leftovers became more & more habituated, & eventually their descendants became camp-followers, choosing to attach themselves to human bands when our ancestors were still hunter / gatherers.

RetrieverMan / Scott found another hypothesis: that modern wolves are so shaped by centuries of persecution that they are bad options for testing "taming" as a domestication process; they're too paranoid.
The Pleistocene proto-wolves that were the twig of dogs' ancestry are all gone; dogs are their only living remote descendants. But there is one subspecies of modern wolf which hasn't suffered intense genocidal harassment.
 
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#3 ·
Scientifically speaking, this would be the correct way to describe the modern wolf/domestic dog relationship. Dogs did not evolve from modern wolves- there are several thousand years of divergent evolution between those populations. They did evolve from the population that would become grey wolves, and are technically still considered a subspecies I think, but what likely really happened is that the "wolf" population diverged into animals that would become dogs (those less fearful wolves able to use human refuse from growing human settlements as a food source, then put under increasing selective pressure for tolerance and later social competence towards humans) and those animals that would become modern grey wolves (started more fearful and have been put under directly opposite selective pressures of aversion and fear towards humans).
 
#7 ·
I wouldn't quite agree with the comparison of humans-chimps and domestic dogs-modern wolves. The phylogenic split between what became humans and what became chimps/bonobos is MUCH further back than that between domestic dogs and modern wolves, and there has been much more divergent evolution at work in our case versus that of dogs.
 
#8 · (Edited)
I was thinking that myself. The factor that caused the human lineage to split from the other chimp species was more likely due to climate changes in eastern and southern Africa. When these regions became savannas instead of forests, there was an evolutionary advantage in standing erect and using arms for balance.

The retreiverman blog is interesting, and I've started to follow it. But in this case, I'd be more convinced if he had cited more material supporting his theory.
 
#10 ·
I'll admit that I didn't actually read the referenced article until now, just looked at the responses on the forum. The guy is a decent writer and clearly interacts with a number of sources on the topic, though it sounds like they're largely documentaries. His vocabulary (using terms like "monphyly of the species") leads me to believe he has had some degree of education in regards to evolutionary biology, though I can't find specifics on a brief review of the website. So- I don't think he's necessarily an uneducated source, but some of his ideas.

I can't speak with much in depth knowledge on the ideas about human evolution- I do know that there's a split as to whether or not knuckle walking is an ancestral trait of the clade (humans and great apes). I don't know which way general opinion tends to sway on this topic.

I can, however, speak quite a lot to his ideas about dog domestication. There are two main ideas of how dogs were domesticated. The longest-held belief is that we domesticated them intentionally, removing wolf pups during a critical period of socialization and bottle raising/taming them. The more recent, and more widely upheld hypothesis within the science, is that of "self domestication" proposed by Raymond Coppinger. This idea was spurred by the observation that many settlements have feral dog populations of dogs that have never been owned, produced by dogs that have never been owned. There tends to be a rough size and shape to the dogs, and true "village dog" populations are of true crossbred dogs that have had minimal genetic input from modern breeds.

Coppinger's hypothesis is that some ancient wolves had a lesser "flight distance" towards humans- that is, they were willing to tolerate a closer proximity to humans than others of their species. At human settlements, it is likely there were collections of refuse that would have been edible for the wolves. Those animals with a lesser flight distance- those able to tolerate a closer proximity- were able to make use of these food sources. Over time, there was selective pressure on this population for animals with even lesser flight distance, until presumably they lived within the settlements themselves, of their own volition and without the need to be restrained.

It is important to remember that even the more conservative estimates of when dogs were likely domesticated- the point at which their ancestors began to experience markedly different selective pressures from the rest of the population- are before the agricultural revolution, and more importantly before widespread evidence that human populations were keeping or confining any animals as a food source. Add to that that evidence suggests that there were several separate domestication events in unrelated, isolated populations across the world. It seems unlikely that multiple human populations would all have had the novel idea to capture very young wolf pups and raise them at this time. It is more likely that environmental pressures began pushing humans towards a different style of living, introducing trash heaps closer to human settlements, and multiple populations of a similarly widespread species began to exploit a new food source.

There is also support given to Coppinger's hypothesis by the Belyaev Fox experiment (this seems to be one of the better explanations of the study: https://dogcogblog.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/belyaev-and-the-farm-fox-experiment/). Short version: a Russian scientist was exiled to a fur farm in Sibera due to darwinist ideas at a time when the party line of the country followed a different idea of evolution (I believe it was Lamarkian evolution, the idea that traits are introduced over the lifetime of an animal). Scientist then performs a secret experiment under the guise of making the fur foxes easier to handle. Scientist breeds two lines- one with a greater flight distance (less fearful of humans, able to tolerate humans near their cage or with hands in their cage without a less fearful, less aggressive response) and one with lesser flight distance (more fearful of humans, displaying an extremely fearful and aggressive response to human proximity). The line bred for lesser flight distance (ie, less fear) displayed changes very similar to those that had to happen in domestication from wolf to dog within very few generations- change in ear set, introduction of piebald coat patterns, increase in affiliative and appeasement behavior towards humans, change in skull shape towards the juvenile form, etc.

Going back to the originally posted article- the author has two main suppositions.

One is that modern wolves are poor models for ancient ones. He presents this as a novel idea he came up with, and while it is possible he came to this realization on his own, it is not a novel one. John Bradshaw (a widely regarded scientist who largely studies dog cognition) presents this idea in his book Dog Sense. He supposes that the domestic dog and the modern wolf represent an ongoing divergence within a species. He proposes that ancient wolves diverged into two populations facing opposite selective pressures- one population is that that produced the domestic dog, facing selective pressures for cooperation with humans. The other population- that that produced the modern wolf- faced the opposite selective pressure, facing strong pressure for fear of humans. Thus, the modern wolf is unlikely to reflect the behavior of their ancestors. This is a sound claim.

His other supposition is that because modern wolves who have not been exposed to humans appear to show less fear of humans and are more willing to approach them/interact with them, it would have been easier for ancient humans to capture them and bring them into their homes. While I think his point about wolves who have not been exposed to humans being braver is a good one, I think his claim that this discredits Coppinger's hypothesis is a whole bunch of mallarky. The reason it's unlikely humans captured and tamed wolves has less to do with wolves being fearful and more with the fact that it seems unlikely that humans would have captured and contained a predator (that shows amazing skill in escape) prior to attempting it with a food source and without much gains on the part of the humans. Remember, this was when humans were still highly nomadic and the containment of a large, naturally far-ranging predator would have been made even more difficult than it already is.
 
#11 ·
I agree I watched the fox evolution on National Geographic what basically happened is the man keep them separated. The one group that was calmer could be around humans did start changing fur temperament everything. The other group didn't they were aggressive and wanted nothing to do with us. I thought they just changed to make sure they survived after reading what you said it would make since if there was a different wolf long ago that made dogs then died off and there was a split of the species our modern wolf with the domestic dog. The same thing that happened to the foxes could've happened to the wolves they were brought in captured and through time changed that would make since if it happened to foxes it can happen to wolves.

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