The Big Search to Find Out Where Dogs Come From
Photo credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times
By James Gorman
Before
humans milked cows, herded goats or raised hogs, before they invented
agriculture, or written language, before they had permanent homes, and
most certainly before they had cats, they had dogs.
Or
dogs had them, depending on how you view the human-canine arrangement.
But scientists are still debating exactly when and where the ancient
bond originated. And a large new study being run out of the University
of Oxford here, with collaborators around the world, may soon provide
some answers.
Scientists
have come up with a broad picture of the origins of dogs. First off,
researchers agree that they evolved from ancient wolves. Scientists once
thought that some visionary hunter-gatherer nabbed a wolf puppy from
its den one day and started raising tamer and tamer wolves, taking the
first steps on the long road to leashes and flea collars. This is
oversimplified, of course, but the essence of the idea is that people
actively bred wolves to become dogs just the way they now breed dogs to
be tiny or large, or to herd sheep.
The
prevailing scientific opinion now, however, is that this origin story
does not pass muster. Wolves are hard to tame, even as puppies, and many
researchers find it much more plausible that dogs, in effect, invented
themselves.
Imagine
that some ancient wolves were slightly less timid around nomadic
hunters and scavenged regularly from their kills and camps, and
gradually evolved to become tamer and tamer, producing lots of offspring
because of the relatively easy pickings. At some point, they became the
tail-wagging beggar now celebrated as man’s best friend.
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