From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri 27 Jan 2006 - 10:59:17 GMT
on 1/27/06 5:22 AM, Chris Taylor at chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk wrote:
>> Can you folks stand an EP analysis?
>
> Yeah I reckon, because there's something very deep going on here
> that goes waaaay back; and while I think you'd make a biological
> brain-structure argument and I'd make a kind of 'sub-memetic'
> argument (ignore that for now -- I just don't have a better
> phrase) the inputs and outcomes are the same if you squint a
> little (and your grasp of prehistory trumps mine).
>
> Incidentally, although lots of people have mentioned farmers and
> cat ppl as not 'dog ppl', clearly dogs do have a special place
> for more or less all of humanity.
Domestication of Dogs
From The New York Times, 11.22.2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/science/22DOGS.html?pagewanted=all&positio
n=top
From Wolf to Dog, Yes, but When?
By NICHOLAS WADE
Few relationships are so laden with mutual benefit as that between man and
dog. Much of the credit for this unusual state of affairs, it now turns out,
may lie on the canine side of the equation.
Three studies in today's issue of Science shed light on the questions of
when, where and how dogs were first domesticated from wolves. One suggests
that a few wolves, perhaps from the same population somewhere in east Asia,
are the mothers of almost all dogs alive today.
Advertisement
Despite some researchers' belief that dogs were domesticated independently
in the Old World and in the New, domestication may have happened only once,
probably around 15,000 years ago. Dogs seem quickly to have become highly
prized and were brought along by the settlers who reached North America via
the land bridge across the Bering Strait until the last ice age. This is the
conclusion of a second study, based on DNA retrieved from ancient dog bones
from Mexico, Bolivia and Peru, which found that all the pre-Columbian dogs
belonged to Eurasian dog lineages.
A third study probes the psychology of dogs, showing that although
chimpanzees may have brain power of far greater wattage, there is one task
at which dogs excel, that of picking up cues from human behavior. This
interpretive skill was perhaps the ability for which they were selected.
The origin of dogs, as judged by their mitochondrial DNA sequences, was
first addressed five years ago by Dr. Robert K. Wayne and colleagues at the
University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. Wayne showed that dogs were
indeed derived from wolves, as long suspected, but he set their date of
origin as a separate population at 135,000 years ago.
Archaeologists found the date implausible because the earliest known dog
bones date to only 14,000 years ago. Dr. Peter Savolainen, a former
colleague of Dr. Wayne now at the Royal Institute of Technology in
Stockholm, has now proposed a date that is more palatable to archaeologists.
On the basis of DNA from several wolf populations and from the hairs
collected off 654 dogs around the world, Dr. Savolainen calculates a date
for domestication either 40,000 years ago, if all dogs come from a single
wolf, or around 15,000 years ago, the date he prefers, if three animals
drawn from the same population were the wolf Eves of the dog lineage.
Dr. Savolainen believes that dogs originated from wolves somewhere in East
Asia, because there is greater genetic diversity, often a sign of greater
antiquity, in Asian dogs than in European dogs.
Separately, Dr. Wayne and another colleague, Dr. Jennifer Leonard, analyzed
the DNA of New World dogs, expecting to find that they had been domesticated
by American Indians from local wolves. To exclude dogs brought from Europe,
Dr. Leonard gathered pre-Columbian dog bones from archaeological sites and
extracted their DNA. The samples matched that of Eurasian dogs, not American
wolves, showing that dogs, of at least five lineages, must have been brought
from the Old World to the New by pre-Columbian settlers.
These pre-Columbian dog lineages have disappeared. Even New World breeds of
dog like the Eskimo dog, the Mexican hairless and the Chesapeake Bay
retriever, derive from dogs brought from Europe. It is not clear why the
pre-Columbian dogs were lost, but possibly American Indians preferred the
European dogs for some reason and prevented their own dogs from breeding
with them.
The dates yielded by dog DNA suggest that wolves were domesticated by
hunter-gatherers, before the invention of agriculture and permanent human
settlements. But domestication is an arduous process, in which animals must
be selected for a particular trait through many generations, by several
generations of people. It is hard to see how hunter-gatherers could have
foreseen the payoff from domesticating wolves, or would have known what
traits to select for.
Two experiments bear on this puzzling issue. One was started by Dmitry K.
Belyaev, a biologist at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in
Novosibirsk, Russia. He spent 26 years domesticating the silver fox, using
tameability as the sole criteria of selection. Dr. Lyudmila Trut, who
continued Dr. Belyaev's work after his death, reported recently that after
selecting from 45,000 foxes over 40 years the institute now had 100 fully
tame foxes. Tameability has brought with it other changes, like floppy ears
and white-tipped tails where pigment has been lost from the fur.
Another experiment, reported in today's Science by Dr. Brian Hare of Harvard
and colleagues, shows that dogs have a special ability to pick up human
cues. Chimpanzees will notice where a person is looking but do not take the
hint that the box being looked at is the one holding the hidden food. Dogs
get the picture immediately, Dr. Hare reports.
Wolves, though very smart, are much less adept than dogs at following human
cues, suggesting that dogs may have been selected for this ability.
So were dogs' ancestors selected for tameability or trainability? Dr. Ray
Coppinger, a dog behavior expert at Hampshire College, believes that neither
is the case. Wolves domesticated themselves, Dr. Coppinger argues in a
recent book, "Dogs," written with his wife, Lorna Coppinger. Wolves, which
are scavengers as well as hunters, would have hung around the campsite for
scraps, and those that learned to be less afraid of people survived and
flourished, in his view.
"It was natural selection ‹ the dogs did it, not people," Dr. Coppinger
said. "The trouble with the theory that people domesticated dogs is that it
requires thousands of dogs, just as Belyaev used thousands of foxes."
From the half-tamed, camp-following wolves, he believes, people may then
have adopted some cubs into the household and found that they could be
trained.
Hunter-gatherer peoples often bring back baby wild animals and keep them as
pets until they become unmanageable. Dr. James Serpell, an expert on dog
behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that this is a more
likely explanation of dog domestication than that people adopted scavengers.
The particular population of East Asian wolves identified by Dr.
Savolainen's genetic studies, Dr. Serpell suggests, might have had some
special feature that made them easier to train.
Once dogs had been domesticated, they would have been of great value to
hunter-gatherer societies, though it is hard to know what specific quality
the domesticators sought.
"They could have been useful as guard dogs, for hunting, as an emergency
food supply, as bed warmers," Dr. Leonard said.
When two species live together for a long time, each usually influences the
genetically conferred qualities of the other. People may have selected
preferred abilities in the dog, but dogs too may have fostered their
favorite qualities in people ‹ not of course deliberately but simply by
giving people who used dogs a better chance of surviving than people who did
not.
"This is a symbiotic relationship with substantial time depth," said Dr.
Richard Klein, a Stanford University archaeologist. "You could imagine dogs
would be useful for giving warning signals, or tracking other animals, so
you can see how both sides would benefit."
If people and dogs have been living together for a long time, "there would
have been some co-evolution of traits that made them function together
better," Dr. Serpell said. Dogs' ability to pick up on human cues, as shown
by Dr. Hare's study, is an example.
Dr. Hare hopes to visit Novosibirsk and test Dr. Belyaev's tame silver
foxes. If the foxes do just as well as dogs in interpreting human behavior,
that will suggest that selecting for tameability alone brings about
trainability as well, perhaps because calmer dogs are better learners. If
the foxes flunk the test, however, that would indicate that trainability
must be selected for separately, Dr. Hare said.
Dogs were probably the first animal to be domesticated and seem to have
assumed considerable importance in early human societies. Dr. Darcy Morey, a
University of Kansas archaeologist who has studied dog burials all over the
world, speaks of the "incredible compatibility of wolves and men." The
finding that pre-Columbian settlers brought their dogs with them from the
Old World is an indication of the animals' value to them.
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