The Secret Life Of The Dog

Here is the iPlayer link to a very good edition of Horizon from last night, which deals with the evolution of the peculiar form of human-oriented social intelligence we call dog behaviour. The question of how dogs evolved from wolves is dealt with, as is Belyaev's Arctic fox domestication experiment - all as appears in THE APE THAT DOMESTICATED ITSELF in the book.

The programme stresses the point that wolf-cubs cannot be tamed by simply being brought up in human care. With the onset of adulthood comes selfish, unruly behaviour. Although dogs evolved from some sort of wolf, the process took many thousands of years and involved profound changes in neuro-endocrine circuits that resulted in relative loss of aggression, tolerance of the presence of humans, and enhanced and acute attention to human emotions and communicative signals. The neotenization of dogs, I argue in NOT A CHIMP, tells us a great deal about processes that might have come about in human evolution.