Canis lupus hominis

Posted in dog domestication, great books | Tagged How the Dog Became the Dog, Mark Derr | 3 Comments

3 Responses

1. on November 9, 2011 at 10:03 am Jen Robinson

   Radio interviews aren’t a great format for showing the scholarship behind the opinions, but I wasn’t real impressed. Cute point that humans haven’t domesticated other scavengers, but really, argument by setting up a straw man and knocking it down. I don’t hear many people saying domestication happened only after agricultural settlements began. I would have liked to see more reference to the findings of the dog genome, and the mitochondrial DNA evidence suggesting very early domestication (Boyko et al 2009). Disappointed that the concept of multiple domestication ‘events’ wasn’t considered. Seem entirely plausible to me that in one tribe, women and kids adopted a cute wolf cub while in another the hunter-hunter symbiosis took hold, and in another, the scavenger turned protector and guardian, and in yet another, wolf-dogs or dog-wolves were used as meat when larger pray was scarce. Nor do I see reason to exclude further domestication events after humans took to agriculture. Wish I had the library resources to track down articles like Akey, J. M. et al. 2010 “Tracking footprints of artificial selection in the dog genome.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(3):1160-1165. . . .which looks to be much more interesting.
   (My connection is too slow to listen to this via internet . .. I may have missed something when I listened to it on the radio).

   
   
   • on November 9, 2011 at 10:10 am retrieverman

     Mark Derr does cover multiple domestications in the book.

     Wolves have been scavenging off of people for thousands of years in various part of the world, but they remain wolves. Israel and Italy are full of scavenging wolves.

     Why didn’t man domesticated black-backed or golden jackals if all it takes is for animals to evolve to lose their fear of humans? Black-backed jackals have been following hunter-gatherer camps in Africa for far longer than humans have even seen wolves.

     If that’s all it takes, then the black-backed jackal would have been domesticated.

     
     
   • on November 9, 2011 at 3:24 pm Jess

     Knock yourself out:

     http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/01/06/0909918107.full.pdf+html?with-ds=yes

     
     

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