Dogs are widely regarded as ‘man’s best friend,’ but this wasn’t always the case. Prior to forming a close-knit relationship with human populations, canines were often in fierce competition with them. Through the use of genetic analysis, it has been discovered all dogs are descendants of their endangered ancestor, the grey wolf. Since both the grey wolf and humans were at the top of the food chain at the time they converged, the two species were left with the following options: compete for the top spot or work together. Those individuals who chose to compete with humans died off and with them the entirety of the grey wolf population. However, those who chose to work with humans made an incredibly crucial decision to their survival and altered the evolutionary trajectory of their species forever.
How and where dogs in the wild began their unique bond with humans isn’t fully known. Scholars differ in their estimates, but archeological and genetic evidence suggests the relationship emerged somewhere between 15,000 – 40,000 years ago. Wolves were the first species to take a step towards domestication and the only one to do so during the human hunter-gatherer stage prior to the formation of agrarian societies. During this stage, humans had not yet invented farming and depended solely on the natural world around them. This means that all of their resources came from their surrounding environment, an environment known by both them and grey wolves alike.
The relationship between humans and wolves would have slowly begun to alter as subsets of wolves saturated themselves into human communities. Drawn to the communities because of the easy access to food, wolves would have kept returning and staying nearby. This would, in turn, supply the communities with protection and alert them of nearby predators. As the trust between the species grew, wolves would likely have become hunting partners with humans, increasing the success of hunts for both species. Whether or not humans intentionally tamed wolves for protection, companionship, or hunting is unknown, but their growing relationship led to one of the first genetic components in domesticated canine evolution.
A defining mechanism of evolution is natural selection. In the wild, certain traits are more advantageous than others and can help an organism survive longer. This gives it an advantage over its peers without those traits, increasing the organism’s likelihood to reproduce and pass on its genetic information. In the case of grey wolves that were interacting with humans, those who were friendly, helpful, and docile to human communities would be the same individuals that humans would share resources with and envelop into their lifestyles. In comparison, those who were unfriendly, destructive, and aggressive would not have been tolerated. The hostile wolves would either be denied from the communities or killed off immediately. With wild wolf populations plummeting, the human-friendly wolves began breeding and passing along their “friendly, helpful, and docile” traits to the next generation. This is an early example of selective breeding and it resulted in the domestication of the grey wolf species. Without knowing it, humans had begun a companionship domestication process that would continue for thousands of years.
