A New View of Dog Domestication: Human-Canid Co-evolution

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This post is written by guest commentator Randall Johnson.  Once involved in river dolphin research and preservation, Randall Johnson lives in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where he works as a Portuguese-English translator. His household includes three dogs, two of which were adopted off the streets, and he's active in a local group that rescues stray dogs and works to find them good homes. For another post by Randall Johnson on a difference between wolves and dogs, see the Dog Behavior Blog at http://www.dogbehaviorblog.com

     For millions of people around the world, their dogs provide not only an important source of companionship, but also offer a daily way of reconnecting with nature, if for no other reason than they force us to get off our backsides and take them outside for a walk. The intense bond between humans and dogs is an old one, perhaps going back as far as 135,000 years, and we may well ask how it all got started.

     Although a number of theories have been advanced, Austrian ethologist Wolfgang Schleidt, a disciple of Konrad Lorenz, offers an elegant view that emphasizes companionship and cooperation over human domination (see Schleidt, W.M.and Shalter, M.D. Co-evolution of humans and canid: An alternative view of dog domestication: HOMO HOMINI LUPUS? Evolution and Cognition 9(1) 57-72, 2003.). Instead of perpetuating the traditional view that dogs are the products of our ancestors’ ingenuity, Schleidt proposes that the initial contact between humans and gray wolves—from which dogs descended—was mutual and that the impact of the wolves’ social ethics on our own may equal or surpass our impact on their having become dogs. He sees the various changes that occurred both in humans and wolves as a process of co-evolution.

     One of the most intriguing aspects of Schleidt’s scenario is that wolves had a powerful influence on the social ethics of the early human groups through a kind of ‘lupification’ of human behavior or, to put it another way, the ‘humanization of the ape’. Wolves, as pack animals, survive by cooperation and teamwork. They hunt together, raise pups together, share food, and share risks. On the other hand, the social life of chimpanzees, our closest biological relative, is opportunistic, almost Machiavellian in nature, with chimps looking out for ways to get the better of each other. If we look for the biological roots of those traits we value as being especially humane, like group loyalty and cooperation for the common good, we don’t find them in apes. Instead, we find them in the social canids, like the gray wolf.

     At some point after humankind separated from a chimpanzee-like ancestor around six million years ago and spread across Eurasia and into North America, the sociality of human groups stopped completely resembling the primate model and began reflecting elements of the canid model. Based on new paleontologic, biogeographic, and genetic evidence, Schleidt suggests that this shift coincided with the time humans came into close contact with wolves after moving into their domain. Wolves were not only top predators, but also nature’s first ‘pastoralists’, living off of vast, migrating herds of ungulates, e.g., reindeer and bison. During the last Ice Age, these human groups learned how to co-exist with wolves, adopting their pastoralist lifestyle and even some of their pack behavior (learning to cooperate as a group, share risks, extending relationships beyond immediate kinship, etc.). This was also the period during which early humans (i.e. Neanderthals) gave way to modern humans and dogs began separating from wolves.

     Of course, this is an extremely simplified version of one facet of a richly-detailed theory. For those who want to see the ‘big picture’, I urge them to visit the following site and read the full article: www.uwsp.edu/psych/s/275/science/coevolution03.pdf.

--Randall Johnson

Comments

[Brooke]

I'm doing a national history day project on this!! I have had SUCH a hard time finding other sources other than the Co-evolution essay... but it is VERY interesting

[dog insurance]

interesting...