Latest News On Dog Evolution

In the chapter on domestication in NOT A CHIMP I favour a version of dog evolution which posits that humans did not actively go out to tame wild wolves but that, if anything, wolves are too large to have been likely dog progenitors and that at least the early stages in the evolution of dogs involved a loose form of commensalism in which a smaller wolf-like species or other wild canid tamed itself by selecting for the ability to tolerate human proximity while foraging in rubbish dumps on the periphery of early human settlements. This still leaves open the question of likely dates during which this process might have occurred. Now Peter Savolainen and a number of Chinese colleagues have examined mitochondrial DNA from wolves and extant dogs and decided that the cradle for domestication of dogs was in China, probably just south of the Yangtse river, about 16,000 years ago. Humans and dogs subsequently ranged widely over Asia and dogs thereby wound up in Natufian settlements in present-day Israel by about 11,000 years ago. 16,000 years ago was the earliest time for a change from hunter-gatherer to sedentary agriculturalists in present-day China, and the beginning of rice cultivation. These researchers believe the progenitor was the smallish Chinese wolf, and, while nodding in the direction of the commensalism theory, they clearly favour a more active role for humans in selection among wolf females for tamable offspring. This runs counter to a large body of information on wolves that suggests they are, effectively, un-tamable. Interestingly they present a completely new angle on the motivation for this supposed domestication of wolves by suggesting they were used as a food resource! The Chinese are reputedly fond of dog-meat to this day but I think this is a shaggy dog domestication story!