The model showed that over 15,000 years, natural selection could potentially drive dog self-domestication. But for this to happen, two conditions had to be met: Wolves had to choose to stay near humans to eat food scraps, and they had to select mates with a similar temperament.
Why would humans feed wolves scraps without them providing something of value in return?
Wolves have to provide something to humans in order for humans to keep feeding them right? In this case, humans would want some wolves around them. Therefore, it seems very unlikely to be self domestication because humans would have a heavy sway in how dogs evolved.
On this point I’m convinced that bears are well on the way to domestication.
National parks have a name for the ones starting to show domesticated behaviours - ‘problem bears’. Bears that go out of their way to interact with humans. I feel that’s a case study for domestication right there.
I've seen "problem baboons". The issue with baboons is that they are clever and dexterous enough to do things that other wildlife does not. They know to pull on door handles. So they can get into a kitchen via an open window, open cupboard doors until they find the one with the cold food inside, leave the door open, haul the food out, eat some, shit on the floor, climb up the drainpipe onto the roof with some of their haul etc.
They're clever enough to scatter when someone raises a rifle and points it at them; but they'll do the same if you use a wooden walking stick.
And of course they're highly social, seldom encountered alone.
Issue is that for domestication to be possible, there has to be a preexisting social structure like herding, colonies, or packs. If it's too weak or non existent, there's no chance that domestication is possible. Having docile examples are always going to be a thing, as snakes aren't exotic pets nor social by any stretch, but that's not what domestication is.
There's an additional risk with omnivorous/carnivorous animals could see people as prey, and this risk pretty much goes up with the size of the animal.
I have no idea how bears act with one another, but I do know they can eat meat and are basically person sized.
>for domestication to be possible, there has to be a preexisting social structure like herding, colonies, or packs. If it's too weak or non existent, there's no chance that domestication is possible.
Is that really true? A cat seems to relate to a person as if the person were the cat's mother. The kneading with its paws that a cat does after it jumps into your lap is what a kitten does in the wild to induce its mother to express milk.
Feral domestic cats have colonies. I don't think their nearest wild relatives do, but its at least conceivable that colony structure of cats living around human populations, off of leavings and rats, etc., that were attracted to human populations developed first, then domestication happened later.
IME bears are sadly quite thick. They will get used to humans but also easily feel threatened by them. So first they won't keep their distance, but then may well act aggressive / threatened. They'd need to somehow lose the aggression to continue on the road to pethood.
Based on many reports of brown bear behaviour in the Carpathian mountains and an N=1 natural experiment.
Black Bears 'aggression' is almost exclusively what is called bluster. It is a stress/fear response.
But they aren't social hunters so the ability to lose that fear response isn't something that was selected for.
Similar to racoons and even bald eagles, which are like pistons in Alaskan fishing towns, with a wider fear boundary radius.
Urban coyotes, which are typically solitary, mating pair or sibling group limited are similar, being there but hiding in the shadows in fear typically.
If you have ever had the misfortune of knowing someone with a wolf hybrid, that fear resulting in unpredictable behavior is fairly obvious.
Brown bears have more subtle stress indicators, if you watch the tragic videos recorded by Timothy Treadwell, and have experience with brown bear stress indicators it is quite obvious.
Obviously most animals are opportunistic, with even animals like horses being willing to eat voles or chicks that enter the pasture, and Treadwell stayed past the bountiful times when brown bears suppress their fear to co-feed with other bears which changed the calculus and ended poorly for him and his girlfriend.
The species that have been domesticated almost universally are cooperative either for protection or for finding food.
IMHO, the development of the ability to read human emotions is what allowed for the domestic dog.
My first job in highschool was as the kennel boy at a rural veterinary clinic. Dealing with injured animals safety was almost always about controlling my own lack of stress indicators and trying to communicate intent while observing for stress indicators in the animal. No matter if it was an injured dog or horse etc...
But you often had to remove them from their owners because dogs, being social are great at picking up clues from their owners. If an owner was concerned their dog would bite, it would almost always do so. Yet if you removed that cue, it is amazing how much less likely it was .
If you observe bears interaction with other bears it is typically filled with stress indicators like jaw clacking etc...
They never comfortable with any bear that isn't a mother or sibling.
So I doubt that there is a real reliable path to pet hood for them, just as there isn't, unfortunately, for most wolf hybrids.
The aggression (really almost always harmless bluster) is simply a secondary emotional response to the primary fear and anxiety.
They aren't 'thick' they just aren't built the same way.
> Why would humans feed wolves scraps without them providing something of value in return?
Human beings aren't all always that transactional. "Homo economicus" is joked about for good reasons.
You can easily imagine situations where a) food is in a temporary surplus due to a successful hunt, so there is little downside to wasting some and b) a sentimental child has access to it.
close, but of course far more complex, Wolves are
savy negotiators, highly social, and often (not always) fun loving, the variations in personality
amongst them is large.Wolves team up with Ravens, another species with complex behaviors, ravens work as airial spoters, and wolves take out the targeted prey, with both sharing the kill, in exceptionaly close quarters, it's easy to see that
those roles could change, with humans around, and
there is a limited window to prepare and consume, and drag off a large kill, before it atracts an apex preditor, or just a huge flock of hungry birds, that can decimate an untended carcas in miniuts.So teaming up, rather than dependency, is the most likely begining.
Archiological work on wolf dens, show that choice sites in the Canadian High Arctic, have been in continious use for 10000 years, by Canadian Wolves
showing that a core group, will maintain a teritory, indefinitly.....even with humans and other large dangerous animals around...
Peoples view of dogs, is often based on experience with what are breeds that are strictly house pets
and have been inbred to the point of bieng helpless morons or neurotic edgy wierdos, but that
one central behavior, of guarding what and where they are instructed to, remains.
There are plenty of humans that got a 100% wolf and managed to keep them around, even in modern times.
In the past, people were always looking for ways to automate hunting, just like we do with technology, as this was the hardest thing.
And if you ever hunted, imagine having a wolf around when you hunt, it's nuts. They are so powerful and can so easily find prey, they have sick instincts too, much better than humans.
Pair them together and you can understand why that combination works so well.
Our ancestors also gave up lots of surviviability skills to become homo sapiens together with our beloved doges.
modern people are so capitalism brained the idea of feeding the animals without them paying is out of scope. Humans love animals, and feeding animals, and keeping them around, people will go to huge lengths to take care of animals for no reason at all.
I'd imagine there's a fair amount of folks with autism here. Nothing wrong with that, but it can lead to these narrower perspectives about certain social topics.
Humans have always like having pets and frequently interacted with all kinds of nature before the industrial revolution, which is an extremely recent event in human history.
Although it turns out domesticated dogs have a wide number of uses _now_, early humans had no idea that would be the case, they probably just liked feeding the wolves.
Edit: there is also speculation that "feeding" wasn't entirely deliberate, that wolves started eating scraps from the garbage piles close to early human settlements and the ones that were friendly to humans (likely children especially) evolved closer and closer into dogs.
Yeah I wouldn’t imagine that “feeding” was anything but wild animals realizing that human encampments have food and therefore need to follow them around or be in their proximity. The animals that would present themselves with aggression, would potentially be killed by the humans and the ones who would keep a more tame approach would be tolerated by humans. Over centuries, the tame behavior turned into domestication.
Providing them less desirable—to humans—-scraps would have likely prevented competition with them in hunting game. Why hunt living game if you can wait around and get scraps for free? So original intention of humans likely not domestication, but still leads that way if the wolves get what they want.
So humans give them food so they don't compete with humans in hunting. The wolves would get full from humans, don't have to hunt, and spend all their time reproducing, which will create even more competition for humans.
ok, so Grug and team know they can take wolves (spears), wolves know they can eat and not be bothered by Grug and team by eating cast off bones/scraps because all of their relatives that went to steal food from Grug didn't make it, but the ones that ate the scraps and were chill with Grug and Grugette ended up making it until Grug Jr.^3 and by then had decided to be on the same team as Grug Jr.^3
Human groups that intentionally or unintentionally fed surrounding wolves are at an advantage. The presense of wolves near the humans would drive off more aggressive predators, which also helps up the local prey populations.
Human groups that did not feed or intentionally drove off wolves are at a disadvantage and more likely to be eaten during the night, or be out-competed for food.
Repeat for a million years or until your wolf grows eyebrows.
Additionally, wolves share their hunt with their pack. It's possible that some early groups were fed at least partially by the wolves hunting for them. If that dynamic ever got established, that group would be at a tremendous advantage.
Well without wolves around it would leave more room for other, potentially much more dangerous, predators. And big cats once roamed most the entire world and are definitely more dangerous to humans than wolves.
humans have a natural drive to do this, not everything is some quid pro quo. How could you see a wolf puppy and not light up? Humans think almost every animal is cute in its own way, its very in our nature.
Just to expand on that, humans keep dogs not just as pets but as guard animals. It could be imagined that early humans feeding wolves to keep them around might also present a deterrent to aggressors.
I would also guess that in some early stages of domesticating other animals feeding the animals that might prey on those animals could effectively lessen the predation.
Yes, the theories in that article don't make a lot of sense. For example this about cats:
> settling into a mutually-beneficial relationship in which they hunted and ate rodents in exchange for food.
Cats mostly hunt birds, because rondents are smarter, faster, stronger and have weapons (teeth).
Also humans and primates throw rocks and sticks at predators. Early dogs must have been caught as puppies, or their parents killed by humans and their flesh eaten.
The whole model has been domesticated to portray a cartoony interaction.
"Cats mostly hunt birds, because rondents are smarter, faster, stronger and have weapons (teeth)."
Where did you get that from? I'm pretty sure it's not accurate, both from reading and personal experience.
Cats don't tackle rats often, and they are at a low risk of being bitten by mice (the hunting technique for mice involves first stunning the mouse by whacking it as hard as possible, ideally using body weight). Mice are smaller than most birds.
Cats do have instincts for rodents, birds and fish. But in most areas rodents are more available, so the cats don't get very good at hunting the other two.
My cousins from the countryside have several cats, and there is plenty of mice and birds. Mostly every prey the cats bring home are birds. Birds are easier to track, nest in visible places, while mice hides better, they are good detectors by smell and sound. Maybe in the city birds are harder to reach.
The more I think about the article the less it makes sense. Humans would have eaten all their preys' meat, and thrown the bones they didn't use to build tools and accesories into pits, would have burned the rest to avoid bringing predators. Proto-dogs would have been like pigs to them, they are still like such in Asia. It's just that their decendants are good alarms and defenders, and can be trained to help in hunting and other tasks.
I've had outdoor cats -- at one point two brothers.
One was a complete terror for birds. He'd go after them all, including hummingbirds. Left bits everywhere. Then we lost him due to something bigger and sharper.
The other one couldn't be arsed to hunt anything, until we moved a couple miles into the country and the house had rodents (due to the previous owner feeding birds). Over the course of the first year, he got 25 and I got 2 with traps. Never saw any evidence of dead birds.
That reminds me of a story. The author Elizabeth Moon and her husband kept horses, and one year they decided to get oats for the winter instead of hay. They didn't realise that oats need to be stored differently, not just in a pile on the barn floor.
They took one of their horses to the vet because he developed a persistent cough; the vet asked a few questions. When he heard how they were storing the oats, his eyes widened, and he leaned forward. "You need to get rid the oats. Now." Then he explained why...
So as soon as they got back they started shoveling the contaminated pile of oats into bags to depose of it. And as they did so, first a few, then a stream of mice started running out of the pile of oats. Their hair was standing on end from disgust, but they had to keep shoveling. At the sound, the cats came from all the nearby farms, so that they were at the centre of a ring of cats; but by the end all the cats had eaten so many mice that they were stuffed; and could only lie there, and watch the mice go by.
Wolves have to provide something to humans in order for humans to keep feeding them right? In this case, humans would want some wolves around them. Therefore, it seems very unlikely to be self domestication because humans would have a heavy sway in how dogs evolved.