Some people are cat people, some people are dog people, and some people are anything else people.
But dogs were the first animals domesticated. Did you know that people have been domesticating animals for 35,000 years? No, I was wrong it is 500 years. Oh look everyone seems to agree at least 14,000.
So what is with all these different numbers?
There are a variety of ways scientists mark domestication.
To domesticate is to breed or train an animal to need and accept the care of human beings. Therefore we can tell a domesticated animal from a “normal” animal by its ability to survive in the wild. Cats are an exception that we won’t get into for this video.
But we can’t tell very well how dependent an animal is on humans when looking at the fossil record. Making guesses about when an animal was domesticated is really hard.
Dogs were the first animals humans domesticated. But the line between wild and domesticated is blurry since dogs grew more and more dependent on us as they followed us around and ate our scraps. Using dogs for hunting came around later. When did these wolves become dogs?
The first way we look at divergence is the actual fossil characteristics. Two different species aren’t going to look the same. This was the original method for classifying species. Using this method dogs were domesticated about 33,000 years ago.
The problem with this method is that animals are more than their bones. With today's technology we can look at their DNA sequence.
That is where genetic testing comes in. The theory is ancient dog DNA will look more similar to today’s dog than today’s wolf. And we find that dog DNA looks like dog DNA 10,000 around the Neolithic age. Yet dogs and wolves actually became separate species about 100,000 years ago according to DNA analysis.
What all this is telling us is when dogs and wolves diverged. We want to know when humans domesticated dogs?
And the truth is a little freaky. Humans never domesticated dogs, at least in the sense of our prior definition.
To understand this we have to go back to what makes us human. Homo sapiens were not the first tool makers. But we developed the best tool making techniques. Researchers hypothesized that the only possible way to do this through dogs. Homo sapiens would spend energy making tools while dogs would be on the lookout for large herds of game. Before homo erectus would track down their own dinner. They didn’t have the partners to advance in the ride of evolution.
Humans became humans because of dogs. We evolved with each other, to be dependent on each other. The drive to domesticate is written in our DNA. This lead to some cool human/dog behaviors. Did you know tilting your head in confusion comes from canines? And dogs are able to read our cues and gestures that even our closest relatives on the evolutionary tree can’t read. These things are pre-set in our behaviors, so that we can better communicate.
So next time someone tells you we domesticated dogs x number of years ago, remember we didn’t domesticate dogs. Dogs and humans domesticated each other. To become humans we needed dogs, and to become dogs they needed us.
Sources:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130302-dog-domestic-evolution-science-wolf-wolves-human/
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/23/people-and-dogs-a-genetic-love-story/
http://www.fos.auckland.ac.nz/~howardross/InspectorFoode/Barcoding.html
http://www.becominghuman.org/node/human-lineage-through-time
http://archaeology.about.com/od/domestications/qt/dogs.htm
