![]() But the changes did not just affect their looks. In only several generations, these friendly wolves would have become very distinctive from their more aggressive relatives. Domestication gave them splotchy coats, floppy ears, wagging tails. The wolves that were bold but aggressive would have been killed by humans, and so only the ones that were bold and friendly would have been tolerated.įriendliness caused strange things to happen in the wolves. Most likely, it was wolves that approached us, not the other way around, probably while they were scavenging around garbage dumps on the edge of human settlements. (See " People and Dogs: A Genetic Love Story.") But essentially, far from the survival of the leanest and meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest. The short version is that we often think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. ![]() If this is a snapshot of our behavior toward wolves over the centuries, it presents one of the most perplexing problems: How was this misunderstood creature tolerated by humans long enough to evolve into the domestic dog? By 1930, there was not a wolf left in the 48 contiguous states of America. North American wolves were not much better off. In response, the Scots burned the forests. In Scotland, the forested landscape made wolves more difficult to kill. The last wolf was killed in England in the 16th century under the order of Henry VII. when Solon of Athens offered a bounty for every wolf killed. The first written record of the wolf's persecution was in the sixth century B.C. Over the last few centuries, almost every culture has hunted wolves to extinction. Humans have a long history of eradicating wolves, rather than trying to adopt them. And anyone who has seen wolves in a feeding frenzy knows that wolves don't like to share. Wolves eat a lot of meat, as much as one deer per ten wolves every day-a lot for humans to feed or compete against. ![]() Humans were already successful hunters without wolves, more successful than every other large carnivore. The hunting hypothesis, that humans used wolves to hunt, doesn't hold up either. Either way, most of the Ice Age bestiary went extinct. The fossil record doesn't reveal whether these large carnivores starved to death because modern humans took most of the meat or whether humans picked them off on purpose. In fact, after modern humans arrived in Europe around 43,000 years ago, they pretty much wiped out every large carnivore that existed, including saber-toothed cats and giant hyenas. For one thing, the wolf was domesticated at a time when modern humans were not very tolerant of carnivorous competitors. (See " How to Build a Dog.")īut when we look back at our relationship with wolves throughout history, this doesn't really make sense. Over time, these tamed wolves would have shown their prowess at hunting, so humans kept them around the campfire until they evolved into dogs. The most common assumption is that some hunter-gatherer with a soft spot for cuteness found some wolf puppies and adopted them. In the story of how the dog came in from the cold and onto our sofas, we tend to give ourselves a little too much credit. ![]()
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