Yep. And they call it a "species".
What is humans and wolves closest evolutionary common ancestor?
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Yep. And they call it a "species".
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
You're a little behind the information curve. It's been several years now since they decided, based on DNA, that dogs and wolves are a single species, Canis lupus. A Great Dane and a Chihuahua have more difference in their DNA from each other than either has from a wolf.
The 15,000 years is also old data. Just in the past few months they completed a more exhaustive mapping of the dog genome. It turns out that the first dogs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 12KYA, not in China 15KYA, as we've been told for the past fifteen years based on a partial genome map.
This really turns the hypotheses about the human-dog bond on their heads. 15KYA put it firmly back in the Paleolithic Era, suggesting that nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes of humans kept encountering hunting packs of wolves because they shared the same territory. Eventually both species realized that they had complementary skills so by working together they could bring down more game.
But 12KYA is the Agricultural Revolution, the dawn of the Neolithic Era. It now looks like some of the wolves decided they would rather eat from the trash dumps in our villages, than go to all the trouble of hunting for food. The wolves who chose to live with us and form the first voluntary multi-species community were scavengers, not hunters.
The last time I read anything about this, they were saying it's possible that all dogs are descended from just five individual wolves.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Sorry, to which decision are you referring?
fraggle:
are you familiar with dave mech's work with wolves? he pretty much demolishes the notion of the alpha-male amongst proper, i.e. in the wild, wolves; rather, their social structure tends to resemble familial structures with few challenges to authority, which is typically the eldest or the parents.
the alpha-male phenomenon seems to occur only amongst wolves in captivity, and possibly dogs--i remain unconvinced on the latter.
not unlike the effects of the state on humans, eh?
are you familiar with dave mech's work with wolves? he pretty much demolishes the notion of the alpha-male amongst proper, i.e. in the wild, wolves; rather, their social structure tends to resemble familial structures with few challenges to authority, which is typically the eldest or the parents.
the alpha-male phenomenon seems to occur only amongst wolves in captivity, and possibly dogs--i remain unconvinced on the latter.
not unlike the effects of the state on humans, eh?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
As dog breeders, with a dozen or so in our home at any time, we see the alpha-sorting behavior routinely. It's often a female who gets the job, and other "backyard" breeders (people who treat their dogs as family members rather than keeping them stifled in tiny kennels) have corroborated this. However, to avoid inbreeding we frequently integrate outsiders so I suppose this is not unlike the captive-wolf phenomenon.
Nonetheless it's clear that thousands of generations of captive selective breeding has resulted in a noticeable variance of a dog's instincts from those of the ancestral wolf. Dogs are far more gregarious: wolf packs rarely exceed ten members, usually all family, whereas feral dog packs number in the dozens and it seems like all are welcome to join.
Dogs are also much more cosmopolitan in accepting other species as pack-mates, not to mention pack leaders. You have to practically tear a wolf away from his parents and start socializing him with humans upon birth to get an adult who will be as nonchalant in the company of humans and our cats, pigs and other critters as almost any dog is, no matter how poorly raised.
And dogs have been bred as scavengers for so long that in many breeds the hunting instinct is greatly diluted (as well as slight modifications in their dentition). Wolves will eat garbage if they have to, but most dogs ask for it by name. This is a boon for dog lovers who also have pet rabbits and guinea pigs.
We've been using our uniquely massive forebrains to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior for hundreds of thousands of years. We started making peace with nearby tribes in the Neolithic Era, because larger communities were more productive in farming villages. As our communities became larger, the exploitation of division of labor and economies of scale made life so prosperous that it was obvious to our forebrains that learning to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers in cities was a better life than making war on them and reverting to the emotionally comfortable but physically dismal lifestyle of our ancestors. But a tribe that big requires formal leadership and the old way of letting grandpa do it doesn't work among strangers.
So government had to be invented. We're still kinda workin' the bugs outta that one.
i certainly recognize the behaviors, it's the interpretations we impart to them about which i'm somewhat sceptical. of course, my own dogs and most of the dogs i've fostered have been heelers, and heelers are in a class of their own (i'm not altogether convinced that they're wholly dog; i believe they are part deity.
) i've worked with and trained countless breeds, but i can't help but to regard heelers as a sort of "gold standard."and with heelers especially, the females are like little klaus kinski incarnates: if they sense the slightest compromise in intellect, will, or attentiveness, they will not hesitate to tear you a new one. the reason i question the interpretation is that the behavior seems very much context dependent, and there's a huge element of posturing; obviously, the dogs are communicating to the ones they are challenging as much as they are to all present spectators--but i'm convinced that in many instances it's a total charade, a sort of metacommunication not unlike playful "aggression."
i allow in my own dogs that which i often, to my dissatisfaction, had to discourage with the dogs of clients; basically, i encourage them to "be themselves" in all but the most regimented of contexts--needless to say, i draw the line at egregious intimidation or aggression. daisy and i bike everywhere, and she's very much rule-conscious when out and about on city streets (i don't really "do" leashes, so she's gotta be); but as soon as we get to a park, she's free to do as she pleases. to her, people are like sheep: they exist to do her bidding. BUT, it's all in "good fun." she scouts the park for the "right" sort, and she's got a remarkable eye for knowing who not to fuck with.
i mention kinski as dog/dog and dog/human relations often remind me of the relationship between klaus kinski and werner herzog. their "skirmishes" are the stuff of legend, but as herzog reveals in his tribute to the late kinski--my best fiend--they were actually on quite amicable terms, and they used to go on long walks together to work out choice insults to hurl at one-another whilst in the company of others. i've known so many dogs who insist upon "challenging" each other while spectators abound, but if there's no audience, they dispense with the show.
i've observed packs of pariah dogs in south asia, the middle east, and central america, and it's always fascinating to see mini- and toy-types palling about with the big guys. in asia and the m.e., the dogs tend to be rather homogenized, but you still see lots of fairly distinct breeds in mexico and c. america.
dingoes seem to fall somewhere between the dog and the wolf, and from what i've read (in particular, laurie corbett's classic the dingo in australia and asia), they present far fewer problems with socialization than do even wolf-hybrids. they're skilled hunters, but also regular scavengers. their social behavior i find especially interesting: while they form stable packs, they tend to be solitary except when mating and rearing pups. i suspect the rigors of their environment necessitates this.
We've been using our uniquely massive forebrains to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior for hundreds of thousands of years. We started making peace with nearby tribes in the Neolithic Era, because larger communities were more productive in farming villages. As our communities became larger, the exploitation of division of labor and economies of scale made life so prosperous that it was obvious to our forebrains that learning to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers in cities was a better life than making war on them and reverting to the emotionally comfortable but physically dismal lifestyle of our ancestors. But a tribe that big requires formal leadership and the old way of letting grandpa do it doesn't work among strangers.
So government had to be invented. We're still kinda workin' the bugs outta that one.
i dunno. most contemporary anthropologists emphatically maintain that present-day nomadic peoples are perfectly content with their mode of life; it's not that they lack the means, they lack the will and desire to become sedentary and assimilate. and they are obviously familiar with these "alternatives," through trade and travel, they simply perceive them as less desirable.
an origin myth that circulates amongst aboriginal people of australia's western desert presents two scenarios: "in the first, land is spread via human manifestations and allied with other peoples and lands and this is enduring, but as one is essentially bound to one's land, a depletion of resources may bring about an untimely death (of the "race," so to speak); in the second, places remain isolated and unfederated, interdependence vanishes (or never emerges) and there is always the risk of being consumed by one's enemies. the issue here is NOT to be or not to be, but how to be: "to be of land related but perhaps not to be as an individual life, or not to be of land related but to be of a sovereign land and as an embodied person." (t. swain, a place for strangers)" (quoting myself here.)
personally, i'm somewhat torn. my leanings are largely anarcho-primitivist (and for much of my adult life, i've lived in the "middle of nowhere," completed isolated from the doings of "civilized" folk), but--and i believe that you have mentioned this before, as well--there are certain things i just can't do without, namely proper musical instruments (and recordings) and bicycles.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
The last words I read on this subject said that the dingo is most definitely a dog, having been brought to Australia in the company of Austronesian explorers several thousand years ago. (Perhaps the explorers stayed too, and their DNA is so diluted among the natives that we haven't spotted it.) Still, that makes him older than all but a few of the breeds existing today, so perhaps he is a snapshot of a work in progress.parmalee said:
Of course they are happy with their "ancient" ways, precisely because they are only quasi-Neolithic, not genuinely Neolithic. They have iPods and Swiss Army knives. CB radios and doctors who will show up in a helicopter within a couple of hours if one of their women appears likely to die in childbirth. Smallpox and polio vaccines for the Caesarean-delivered baby. (I'm picking on the Sami, with all the social workers in Helsinki clucking over them and their reindeer herds. Obviously the analogous Stone Age atavists in Somalia or Mongolia don't have access to resources that the nearby city folk don't have.)
Actually two things: someone mentioned that Canis familiaris had been dropped for the metaspecies Canis lupus description. I don't read canine genetics much, but I hadn't heard of this.
Edit: oh, and the "five ancestral wolves" root for Canis.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Sometime in this century the dog was reclassified as a subspecies: Canis lupus familiaris. The DNA of the average dog differs from wolf DNA less than the DNA of a mastiff differs from a Chihuahua.
The same has happened to the cat: a population of the subspecies Felis sylvestris libicus.
I'm sure I'll stumble across that one again and I'll post the link. But it's just a "maybe" so it's not worth haggling over. The origin of the dog has been shifted from Paleolithic China to Neolithic Mesopotamia. They didn't link up with us to form more efficient hunting packs; they came to eat our garbage.