Post by johnnybandit on May 27, 2024 21:13:18 GMT -5
There are multiple theories.... But yours is pretty far fetched... At least on a large enough scale for dogs to evolve from wolves... I am not going to say early man never raided a wolf den..... It had to have happened...
The more likely scenario is that wolves started hanging around human camps and foraging off of scraps humans discarded..... Some wolves obviously figured out that this was a pretty easy to make a living..... Some wolves were over time became quite used to humans.... Humans started seeing the value of these more friendly wolves being around...They alerted the camp of danger, aided in tracking and hunting..... Over time these wolves that chose to live around humans would have bred with each other... they would have passed on the traits for temperament that caused them to so easily lose their fear of humans. And they would have also taught their offspring their survival and relationship strategies with humans.
I am pretty familiar with the Silver Fox experiment.... And it did largely work.... But in a controlled setting....
Wolves transitioned from dogs over possibly thousands of years......
All of the domesticated animals in the world came from wild ancestors, some of which still live, others of which went extinct in earlier or later history. When all the other kinds of domestic animals were tamed, it was by man capturing their wild counterparts and then selectively breeding them. Why would dogs be radically different? I would submit the proclivity to believe this is due to the special pedestal Westerners put dogs on. We want to be believe they chose us because that seems emotionally "special" and consistent with our modern Fido who wants constant attention from us.
Yes we can as humans can take a species and morph a species into something else... you know that, I know that.... you are capable of doing so... I could do so...
But we are not talking about us.... We are talking about humans that lived in 14.000 to 30.000 BC...... And it did not happen at one specific time.... or one specific specific place....It happened many many places over many thousands of years........ Early man did not have the understanding to do this.... Nor did they have the time to devote to this..... they were too busy just trying to survive.,..
The fact that The Paleolithic dog occurred in Europe and has been documented to have hunted along side humans over 30 thousand years ago, is strong evidence that the process occurred naturally
It is nice and tidy to say that some early humans pulled some wolf cubs out of dens and created dogs..... But the answer is that the process was far too complex and happened in far to many places and with far too many variations for that to have occurred.....
Keep in mind that dogs were the first domesticated animals and were here about 5000 years before the next domesticated species (It could be 20 thousand years. But I used the most conservative timeline... And if you factor in Proto dog... Which is known to exist...Domestic dogs showed up over 20 thousand years before the next domesticated animal....