From Wolf to Dog

 

The domestication of animals is a long-drawn-out process involving careful nurturing and breeding of a wild species over many generations. Cattle, sheep and goats were domesticated for food purposes 8,000-10,000 years ago, but the domestication of the wolf long predates this. The wolf is also unique in that it was kept for hunting and guardianship rather than to provide meat or hides, and those traits led it to eventually become man’s best friend.

 A Saami family from Norway, c1900, with one of the dogs they depended on. Wikicommons.

 The taming of the wolf likely developed from the nurturing of a young wolf cub which would become imprinted on its human ‘pack leaders’ just as it would learn to imitate and defer to its wolf elders. The wolf’s natural pack structure gave it a natural aptitude to pick up social cues from its human masters, making it easy to train and within reason, easy to live with. As in Broken Skies, people such as the Anunnaki or Wolf People, who spent a lot of time observing animals and learning their habits and social rules, would soon learn the best ways to live with their tamed wolves.

The wolf was a killer and a serious danger to humans, and careful selection was needed to breed only the friendliest and most docile animals. This selection process caused other changes, such as the curly tails and floppy ears, and led to the creation of a new species: the domestic dog. Interestingly, these characteristics have also been demonstrated in a modern experiment on wild foxes, where the animals were bred for sociability with humans, and those same dog traits began to emerge.

Leuchtender Hund, Wikicommons.

The date for the domestication of the wolf is open to debate. Likely it happened independently in different parts of the world and different stages of history, and some of those dogs survived into modern times while others were failed experiments. The earliest known remains of a domestic dog date to 15,000 years ago, but genetic studies suggest a divergence from wolves around 40,000 years ago. Europe, Asia, Siberia, and the Middle East have all been proposed for their origin.

So people around the world looked at a deadly wild animal and thought, ‘it would be very useful to tame that’. What an illustration of human innovation.