St. Bernards developed their domed heads as a result of selective breeding, not some magical neotenization process.
I am about to explain something that is very hard for people to grasp. It is almost as difficult for dog people disabuse themselves of this common meme in the dog world as it is the dominance model.
This one actually popped up in response to the dominance model, and it’s just as bizarre. It’s one I used to accept without thinking about it, mainly because the only book on dog domestication that I’d ever read was Raymond and Lorna Coppinger’s book, which is where this notion got started.
This theory has largely been falsified for me, for a very simple reason: the dates don’t add up.
Basically, the theory goes this way:
About 12,000 years ago, man started to do small scale agriculture and was able to set up the first permanent settlements. This coincided with a period of scarcity of large prey, which brought wolves into the camps to scavenge. Those wolves that had less fear of people were better adapted to scavenge, and these began to evolve into village dogs. In the village, they adapted to the less high quality food. They evolved smaller brains and jaws, and because they didn’t hunt, they lost their ability to do much hunting to survive. They also became smaller animals, developed floppy ears and spots, and started coming into heat twice a year. And because dogs evolved from this village dog population, we should consider dogs a different species– and we shouldn’t use dominance theory to dominate our dogs.
In this model, the dog became a perpetually juvenilized species compared to the ancestral wolves, and thus, it has become very common for people to call dogs neotenous wolves. Neoteny is the retention of juvenile morphology into adulthood, and it’s normally used in relation to various species of salamander, like the axolotl, that retain the larval gills into adulthood.
Different species can have different neotenous features. The dodo retained much of the morphology of a juvenile pigeon, even though it weighed as much as 50 pounds. Humans have several neotenous features in comparison to other apes, including our broad skulls and hairlessness. The epicanthic eye fold that is present in some human populations, such as in Asia, is also sometimes considered a neotenous trait. However, it’s more like a fetal trait, because it is present in other humans only at the fetal stage.
I’m not denying that some traits dogs have are neotenous. Floppy ears and flattened faces are definite neotenous traits in dogs.
What I think is a bit screwy is suggesting that this is the process by which they were domesticated.
My biggest problem with Coppinger’s theory is the dates simply do not line up. He has no answer for dog remains that have been found in Germany, Russia, and Switzerland that all date to at least 14,000 years before present. That’s 2,000 years earlier than Coppinger thinks they would be found.
Furthermore, 14,000 years ago, there were no villages, even of the type that existed among the earliest agriculturists. These 14,000-year-old were all the product of hunter-gatherer camps, not semi-permanent villages. Strike one.
Then, we have another problem. The genetic data points to an even older origin for the domestic dog than the 14,000-year-old specimens, and the Russian specimens have had a least one dating that the put them at 17,000 years before present. The study that revealed the dog genome calibrated the dog’s split from the wolf to 27,000 years before present. Some of the early mtDNA studies have pointed to an even older origin than this– over 100,000 years before present. However, I’m a bit skeptical of such an old date for dogs, because we don’t have any record of them from this age. We do have records of what might be dogs or early domesticated wolves that are 31,000 years old in Belgium and 33,000 years in the Altai Mountains. These discoveries are a bit controversial, for the simple reason that we can’t assume that domestication always yields major morphological changes between wild and domestic populations. Assuming that domestication always changes morphology is a major hindrance to finding out exactly when dogs began to diverge from wolves. It is possible that many “wolves” found in caves near humans were actually wolves that were domesticated.
All of those dates are older than the 12,000 years that Coppinger needs for his theory to have a basis in the actual history of the earth.
Now, that would be enough for me to really question this theory, but there is more.
What does he do with the odd wolf that acts like a dog?
These exist. I’m not making this up.
There was one in Alaska recently named Romeo, who did all he could to become a dog.
And then there was Wags, the wolf that Adolph Murie took from a den as part of his study of the wolves at Denali.
Then there are the dogs that are very much like wolves, and not all of these are primitive dogs with a wolfish phenotype. Jess at Desert Windhounds has an Azawakh that dislikes being touched and has bonded to only her husband. These are traits we would normally see in wolves that have been raised in captivity, not in a domestic dog breed that was developed where there are no wolves (as far as I know).
The truth is that although there are differences between dogs and wolves, these differences are not hard and fast. There will always be dog-like wolves and wolf-like dogs.
In Coppinger’s theory, physical neoteny, which is there at some level, is accompanied by behavioral neoteny. Wags looked like a fully adult wolf, not like a cuddly little puppy, but she acted more or less like a Labrador retriever. Jess’s Azawakh has drop ears and a hound-dog appearance, both of which are manifestations of physical neoteny.
You cannot predict among dog breeds which ones are friendly or not by their appearance. Kuvaszok look like golden retrievers, but they will guard sheep and property just as wild wolves protect their territories and pups from intruders from other packs. German shepherds and Malinois look like wolves, but they are very easy to train.
And then there are the wolves that live by scavenging today.
If Coppinger suggests that all domestication required was for wolves to scavenge off of human settlements, then why aren’t the wolves of Israel and Italy becoming dogs? I’ve never heard of a floppy-eared wolf in Israel or in Italy. Nor have I heard of one with spots on it.
Then, there is the big one.
Last year, Mark Derr sent me an e-mail with the title “neoteny death nell.” In it was an attachment of a study on St. Bernard skulls by Abby Drake and Christian Peter Klingenberg. The authors discovered that over the past 120 years, the St. Bernard’s skull changed to a more rounded and more dome-like shape as the result of selective breeding, not any magical process that was the result of breeding for greater docility or trainability. The results of this study and a full critique of Coppinger’s neotenous dog model can be found in Mark Derr’s forthcoming book, How the Dog Became the Dog, which will be out in October (but you can pre-order from Amazon today!)
It seems to me that the apparent neotenous features we see in domestic dogs are the result of selective breeding, not this magical neoteny process.
One of the big flaws in Coppinger’s analysis is the reliance upon the Belyaev fox farm experiment to generate most of this theory. I agree that this is an interesting study, but it can’t tell us everything there is to know about dog domestication. It’s not a good 1:1 comparison. In the end, I think the most important thing to come from the experiment is the change in the critical period time between non-selection and selection for tameness foxes. That change in critical periods can have really major effects upon the development of any animal, because a longer period gives an animal much longer time to become social to more creatures. Further, the floppy ears and spots have occurred in farmed foxes for many years, and there is no evidence that these foxes are tame. There are whole strains of non-tame farmed foxes that are spotted. And then, there’s the case of a line of Mexican wolves that were kept at Carlsbad Caverns. After generations of keeping them in captivity, they started to develop dog-like features, even though they had never been selected for tameness. Because of these features, the wolves were thought to be hybrids with dogs and were euthanized. However, the DNA analysis of surviving wolves from this lineage revealed that they were pure Mexican wolves.
Even being raised in captivity can change the morphology of Carnivoran skulls, for there are plenty of examples of zoo lions and wolves having less powerful jaws and smaller heads than wild ones. The larger head appearance is the result of the jaw muscles developing on top of the head, and the jaw power is the result of those muscles being used to kill and dissect large prey.
And then there is the whole theory about motor patterns that Coppinger posits. In Coppinger’s model, domestic dogs that use predatory behavior for “work” have been selected to show those motor patterns only in a truncated manner. Herding dogs can chase and stalk, but they can’t kill. Pointers can only stalk. Retrievers can catch but they can’t kill. Because dogs are derived from non-predatory village dogs, they were selectively bred to show these truncated predatory motor patterns. And that’s all they can show. They can’t kill or dissect prey.
Now, I read this as I watched a golden retriever with very strong retrieving motor patterns– that would retrieve anything at anytime with a very soft mouth– go out, run down and kill a rabbit, dissect it, eat it, and then crap it out in little furry turds in the yard. My own eyes falsified that part of Coppinger’s model.
The Coppinger model is beguiling because, like the dominance model, it is very easily explained on television. It’s easy for the layperson to follow it.
And it’s also a model that many people who reject the dominance model use, because if dogs are derived from village dogs and not wolves, then we don’t need the wolf dominance paradigm at all.
However, when you take on the Coppinger model to refute the dominance model, you wind up shooting yourself in the foot. There are very real problems with the neotenous dog model, as many as there are with the dominance model.
We need to recognize that dogs are wolves, but they are domesticated. However, the process by which they were domesticated was much more complex than the model provided in Coppinger’s book.
To turn neoteny into this bizarre, almost magical process that creates domestic animals is an oversimplification of what was a very dynamic process that happened over tens of thousands of years.
