The recent discovery that dogs have evolved some adaptations to assist in the digest starches has set off a whole wave of speculation about what this means for the domestication of the species.
Some are thundering about the old Raymond Coppinger theory on dog domestication, which posits that the dog evolved from the wolf during the early days of agriculture. According to this theory, the dog is a self-domesticating animal that evolved solely from wolves losing their fear of humans in order to scavenge from our trash heaps.
The logic here is that starches were only a big part of the human diet only when we began to farm, and if dogs have these adaptations, then it must mean that they were domesticated in agrarian societies.
The problem with this logic is twofold.
The first is that dog remains– which no one argues actually are of dogs–have been dated thousands of years before agriculture. I am thinking of the dog discovered at the Bonn-Oberkassel site and another that was found in the Kesserloch Cave in Switzerland. Both of those remains are 14,000 years old, and they clearly predate agriculture by thousands of years. In addition to these two dogs, two dogs that were contemporaries of these Central European canines were discovered in Bryansk region of Russia. These two Russian dogs looked a lot like what we’d call mastiffs or mountain dogs.
And never mind that we have several possible dog remains that are even older than these. The Goyet Cave dog of Belgium and the Razboinichya Cave dog of the Altai Mountains are two canid remains that show signs of domestica tion that both date to over 30,000 years ago.
But most amazing of all has been the discovery of 31,500-year-old skulls of what appear to have been dogs in the Czech Republic. These skulls, which were found at the Předmostí, clearly had something to do with people. for one was buried with a bone in its mouth.
All of these discoveries put dog domestication well into the very distant past– long before we had massive trash heaps and long before we ate lots of bread. The dog is the product of wolves tamed during the time of the hunter-gatherers, not of the earliest farmers.
The other problem with claiming that dogs were derived from self-domesticated scavengers is that lots of animals scavenge off of people, including many populations of wolves.
Yet none of these animals– including the wolves– has become more like a dog simply through scavenging. If scavenging was all that it took, then the black-backed jackal would have been the ancestor of the domestic dog. These jackals have been scavenging off of our species long before wolves did, but even though they readily live in villages and often act as guard dogs to warn of the approach of leopards, they show no signs of domestication. There are no spotted or drop-eared black-backed jackals.
And there are no genetically tame raccoons, European badgers, spotted hyenas, or bears.
But all of these animals readily scavenge off our waste.
The only way the Coppinger domestication theory works is to ignore large chunks of science, but that is precisely what so many science journalists do.
The Coppinger theory is a very neat little package that attempts to make simple what was an inordinately complex move.
Almost everything we know about dog domestication is contradictory. We have competing archaeological and genetic evidence, and all that anyone can actually agree on is that the wolf is that the primary ancestor of the dog, the domestication happened before agriculture, and the domestication happened in the Old World.
Mark Derr takes to task some of the speculation that was generated from that study:
By every genetic and archaeological measure, wolves became dogs in the company of hunting and gathering people at least thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. There simply is no way around that.
Derr thinks that humans would have fed wolves cooked grains from wild grasses, which could have accounted for the selection pressures that would have caused dogs to develop the adaptations for consuming starches.
I am a bit skeptical that humans would have been collecting that much grain to feed dogs, but there are cases of hunter-gatherers doing just that. In How the Dog Became the Dog, Derr discusses a study of a site in China. Using isotopic analysis of human and “dog” remains from that site, the researchers found that the humans were growing broomcorn millet to feed both themselves and their dogs.
My bone of contention with this study is that it didn’t include large enough sample of dogs from a variety of breeds. There were no “primitive” breeds included in the study, and there were no dingoes. Even among the dogs studied, there was variance of how many copies of the amylase-production gene the dog had, which suggests that some dogs are better adapted to a diet rich in grains and starches than others. It would be interesting to see if dogs like dingoes, which lived for thousands of years on a continent with no agriculture, have more copies of the gene than wolves do.
The really interesting part of this study was the discovery that dogs have evolved a tolerance to eating grains and starches.
The unfortunate part of the study is that it caused so much speculation about a theory of dog domestication that is largely contradicted by virtually all the other evidence we have.
In discovering that dogs can eat bread, the researchers threw Raymond Coppinger a bone.
Coppinger is a figure like Lorenz, but unlike Lorenz, who eventually gave up on his hypothesis that most dogs were derived from golden jackals, Coppinger continues to adhere to his self-domestication through neotenic scavenger hypothesis.
Never mind that there are really big holes in the logic behind it.
It is an easy theory to explain between the margins of news copy.
It’s much harder to say that things are much more complex than that.
Very itnteresting. I think animals scavanging from human dumps have to remain sligtly wild tbh. If you look at the situation were bears scavange from humans and become too confident they are often killed as a threat. So a scavanger wolf would have to remain wary else the humans would be alarmed by it an kill it.
Re feeding early tame wolves grains, k9’s ime are very interested in novel food. Raw fed dogs will often work for dry kibble as its differant and interesting. So a early tame wolf would have an interest in the grain its human was eating and would maybe be given some itself. Of course if you had a shortage of meat at any point the human thinking of the future would try and keep their hunting wolf from starving by giving it grains. For the tame wolf this provides a survival advantage over its wild relativels who had no access to grains.
In times were their were more resocurces available wolves might have been fed human food for much the same emotional reason that many people give their dogs human food today!
Adam
Surely more truth will emerge from future discoveries, but in my opinion we already know enough to be quite certain that there must have been many separate occasions when humans rescued wolf pups and on various separate occasions came across individual tamed wolves where the tameness got hard wired by mutation and passed on just as it has with some other domesticated species. The Russian fox taming experiment revealed a lot about the likely evolutionary path of dog domestication. So basically we know enough already not to be too puzzled about it, don’t you think?
I see no reason why the discovery of amalyse production genes indicates domestication happened in an agricultural environment. Animals domesticated by hunter gatherers may have benefitted by gathering as well as by hunting. I think I’ve read that some hunter gatherer groups get much more nutrition from roots and tubers than from meat. But of course, men’s work has more prestige, so all we think about was the hunting. It is possible that dogs domesticated by gatherer-hunters would have increased their starch digestion capability when nomadic people’s became more sedentary.
I suspect another part of domestication had to do with body warmth. Dogs were domesticated at mid latitudes during an age of glaciation. Ice age humans may have suffered as much from cold as from hunger. I’d think the fact that dogs are a few degrees warmer than humans might have made them very attractive as bed-warmers in prehistory. Anyone know if captured wolf pups will snuggle when it’s cold?
I don’t know about captured wolf pups, but captive-bred wolf pups love warmth and snuggle just like puppies and kittens do.
I had wondered if dingoes had been included in the study for comparison. I’d also like to see comparative analyses of jackals and coyotes. Both are known to eat fruit and generally have a much broader dietary range than wolves, and neither have ever been domesticated (that we know of), so it would be interesting to know whether their genetic makeup includes an ability to digest starches.
This study is intriguing, but I think the results are being misinterpreted in some ways. As you have pointed out, a tolerance for dietary starch does not necessarily a domesticate make. To leap to that assumption is to force causality where there is no evidence for it.
I think that nomadic people probably ate grain regularly, on a seasonal basis, as do most large omnivores in regions where grain grows wild. They also, no doubt, have cooked grain for a much longer time than that for which there is direct evidence. I’m sure they reseeded grain in favorable areas, once they realized that they could, long before they began to actively cultivate grain crops in situ, and probably came back to camp in those areas in time to harvest the grain.
Since modern people and dogs evolved together, perhaps this ability to more easily digest starches co-evolved as well (even today, many people have problems digesting various grains). After all, “from four to forty” copies of a gene is a pretty wide range! We know that people had animals that were recognizable dogs thousands of years before the first recognizable agriculture. So it follows that if dogs really became domesticated only after the advent of agriculture, agriculture must have begun earlier – much earlier – than we thought. It would seem that some traces of that early agriculture would have been found if that were the case.
There is much more to be learned about the domestication of dogs, and it wasn’t a linear process that progressed smoothly from Point A to Point B to Point C and beyond. I don’t that Derr has the entire story. But Derr’s version of dog domestication seems much more likely than Coppinger’s.
There’s evidence of Dingo pups being breast fed by the native women… That in itself would suggest a transfer of enzymes and bacteria that would end up in the gut and digestive system of these pups. Put there by the humans that nursed them.
These pups through the transfer of these enzymes would have the advantage of also being better able to handle Starches and Grains.
If the indigenous people who share their lives with dingos are any indication of how things went down in the history of the dog… Then its very easy to see how the hunters would actually eradicate their wolf competition and at the same time foster their surviving pups. bringing them into the fold of humans and thus beginning the long relationship between two very capable and complimentary hunters.
In modern times a dog raised among the animals they are destined to protect and bond with is a very common practice. And in doing so the dogs raised among the heard of sheep they see as their own family become very effective protectors. They can also be fedd on the afterbirth of the mother livestock and stillborns. And partake in the diet of the indigenous people.
Its sort of logical thinking that one can conclude that the practice of the hunters evolved into the practices of the herding populations very easily. And all the steps in between both these extremes can also account for the differences in different dog behaviors and the amount of grain tolerance they also have.
The Scavenger theory is just plain… illogical, especially when all is taken into consideration. It amounts to an easy way out for those who don’t wish to weigh all the facts and want to quickly jump on a bandwagon because someone decided to be an authority on it and say its so because he says so.
If you can be that easily swayed then … Oh well its like religion. Once you’re a believer in faith the rest of the world around you rooted in facts and science is all rubbish.
One thing that both Scottie and Jen touch on is the dingo. It is not 100% correct that Australian aboriginals practiced no form of agriculture as mobs like Ma:mu rainforest people were observed practicing Taro cultivation by early explorers in the Innisfail region where I live. That said this was far from the norm! Though there was no farming of grains and similar starches that is not to say harvested wild starches were not heavily relied on for sustenance. North Queensland rainforest aboriginals were masters at processing toxic plant starches for their sustenance and were able to support higher than average population densities thanks to this skill. Their diet was high in starches/carbohydrates and low in protein and their dingoes would have had to survive on a similar diet. Many early explorers believed the fondness of rainforest aborigines for cannibalism was caused by this low protein diet.
I would not be surprised if dingoes were found to “have more copies of the gene than wolves do” as the aboriginal people they lived with consumed large quantities of starches even though they were not an agricultural society. The ability of a dog to process these starches would be a desirable trait to evolve. As Scottie correctly point out, the flaw with the logic being offered is the (incorrect) assumption that hunter/gatherers like aborigines didn’t consume significant amounts of plant starches compared to agricultural people.
Those are excellent points all Russell! Now my next question to myself is, be it dingo or wolf, at what point did the wild counterpart destined to lead to the dog, decide it was worth the risk of approaching an entirely foreign pack species like homo sapiens, in hopes of getting food, and what sort of food was worth that risk? Wouldn’t it stand to reason that fat and protein rich meats are worth more of a risk than starches? If one could prove starches WERE worth the risk, I’d like to know what environmental pressures encouraged that behavior.
There’s a lady named Annie Pan at the U of Sydney who is involved in trying to isolate the genes causing Cerebellar Abiotrophy in Kelpies. I wonder if she knows anyone who is conducting any research related to the amylase producing genes of canids, or would like to? I think I’ll ask her.
Wolves would have been competitors in these times. It would make more sense that the tribes of hunter gatherers would have killed the competition when given the chance and likely in some form of honoring the prowess of their competition…. would take the pups.
There are Amazon tribes that will foster the babies of their adult prey.
So it would not be an uncommon act on the part of other tribes to foster the babies of their competition and effectively flip their loyalty to their tribe.
American Indians would honor and elevate the hunting prowess of the competing predators they shared their world with. It would make sense that depending on the thinking of each tribe… they would in fact bring the remaining young animals into the folds of the tribe.
Nursing and weening them. And making them effective members.
It is obvious that Aboriginal tribes did do this with Dingos.
Herdsman raise dogs to protect the herds by making them a part of the herd…
Some common sense needs to be applied here.
So you connect the dots and it would make more sense than wolves lingering around the outer edges of the tribal camps and scavenging is not where the dog evolved from.
They were begat from a long tradition and practice of standing fostering relationships with early hunters.
Scavenging had to be the end result when the hunter became more of a farmer and less of a hunter. By that time the result of small dogs living on the outer edge of the community would server two purposes.
They become the first early warning system for bigger predators and they also become the easy target for those predators. A basenji in its native region is more often the target of leopards than the people they live close to.
Just connecting the dots people.
Rman: my thoughts exactly; like I’ve stated in earlier comments on the issue of dogs tolerating grains in their diets, I’ve disagreed with Ray Coppinger from day one (when I first read his book DOGS). As evidence that it would be impractical for primitive man to use the wolf as a hunting partner, Mr. Coppinger points out that when he hunts rabbits with beagles he can’t kill enough to feed himself and the dogs. But the primitive men who first hunted with wolves weren’t hunting rabbits; though they were probably opportunists taking whatever they could, they were no doubt specializing in hunting large ungulates that provided many more calories than were expended by both man and dog. I wrote a mathematical model comparing the success rate of stone age men hunting moose with wolves/dogs (using wolf moose hunting statistics from L. David Mech’s THE WOLF) compared to them hunting rabbits, that showed, yes, a group of men wasting their time trying to hunt rabbits with wolves/dogs would likely starve to death (unless maybe they were hunting the hordes of jack rabbits once common in the American west, or the European rabbits overrunning Australia). But the same group of men hunting moose would have had a high success rate (a moose that stops to fight wolves is usually successful in turning the wolves away, but would have been killed by the accompanying humans with their spears), and not only fed themselves and the wolves/dogs, but would have procured a surplus of food to take back to their camp to feed the people (and puppies) back there.
I know that when I was a younger man (with knees that actually functioned), if I had found myself in some primitive existence where there were plenty of moose or other large ungulates, and I had the group of dogs/wolf-dogs I once had, I could have survived with nothing more than the tools I could fashion out of stone and wood, and those dogs/wolf-dogs to help me hunt. But I would have survived by hunting those large ungulates, not rabbits. All a pack of wolves or dogs would have to do is hold a moose at bay long enough for their human hunting partners to get close enough to stab it with their stone-tipped spears.
Mr. Coppinger doesn’t seem to be able to imagine himself in that primitive situation, but insists upon looking at the dog in its modern form and function, or dogs living in present day hunter-gatherer societies, but used for hunting such strange things as monkeys. While dogs may well help on a monkey hunt, or even root out truffles, I doubt that was what the first wolves to join forces with humans were hunting.
Mr. Coppinger also suggested primitive man would not have used the wolf as a hunting partner since it was so much less useful than a modern hunting dog. I consider that like stating humans would never have used the horse for transportation since it is so much less efficient than the automobile.
Terrific comment, DAC; you’ve put my thoughts into words so well that I can only add: well spoken!
Hoollllly! Very well argued young man, very well argued indeed.
I agree DAC….
The rabbit hunter is not feeding a tribe. Simplified… he hunts for himself and/or immediate family.
The Tribe hunts for the whole group to benefit from it long term. Simplified… they target much bigger game animals.
Either scenario they benefit from a dog to augment their hunt.
Coppinger… is one of those people who likes to hear himself speak. But doesn’t hear anything outside of himself.
Yes, and also it would have taken ages to sew proper rags to keep oneselves warm by using rabbit skins. While hunters brought home large hives “ready-made jackets” – the others could concentrate on the gathering and preparing food.
Maybe this has something to do with it?
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/11/deer_eat_meat_herbivores_and_carnivores_are_not_so_clearly_divided.html
“Generalists, such as raccoons and pigs, can survive in a variety of habitats and climates and can utilize many different food sources. Specialists, on the other hand, tend to exploit one niche very thoroughly and may be able to dominate it for as long as it exists. Koalas are a good example of a specialist species, feeding entirely on the leaves of eucalyptus trees. The koala’s strategy works only for as long as there are eucalyptus leaves to eat, whereas raccoons will probably be around long after koalas (currently listed as a threatened species) are extinct.”
P.S. The video of the deer taking steak from the writer’s hand is pretty amusing. She’s clearly begging for the meat.
Perhaps the proto-dogs that were able thrive on a more varied diet were the ones that stuck around, whereas those that could not either died or went feral again?
Nora, I would also direct your attention to: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/0825_030825_carnivorousdeer.html
Where did you find what breeds they used? I was curious about that myself. I have certain friends caught up in the romance of their particular breed who say things like “Malamutes are closer to wolves and should have more meat in their diet.”
If I may further stir the pot. Might the dog’s tolerance for grains arose after the invention of brewing (about 7ky ago)? Even today, waste grains–malted (sprouted), softened and predigested by the yeast–are used as a valuable feedstock for a wide variety of animals.
Lets try ‘arisen’ vice ‘arose’ shall we…LOL
I wouldn’t want a largeish meat eating beastie prowling around the cave where my bite-sized child was sleeping.
I am unable to understand your point, but let me add that the friendship, or strategic alliance if you will, would have started over hunting grounds rather than near the sleeping grounds – a pack of wolves yielding a carcass to a hunting party and vice versa, depending upon the strength of the other at that particular time, observed over many years.
Please replace ‘started over hunting grounds’ with ‘started on hunting grounds’.
I’m speaking as a woman. If I have a lively 5 year old,a toddler,a child on the hip and am preggers with another I don’t want a large scavenger around the cave door. Bringing home a puppy,raising it with the children,coming to rely on it as an early warning system/bedwarmer/companion is another thing alltogether.
I’m speaking as a woman too, when I say, boy, I just LOVE It when women say “I’m speaking as a woman” as if all women think alike, as if all mothers worry THAT much, or even as if only women have strong parental instincts…..NOT!
That’s oversimplfying humans, and the statement about scavengers about the old human camps is an oversimplification as well. Dogs had to start somewhere, and they started as wolves. A safe level of interaction had to be attained at some point just for dogs to come into existence. It stands to reason that if baby snatching had become such an issue, the amazing process of dog evolution would never have taken place. I thought that was sort of a given.
*sigh* Excuse me for stating that there were women in prehistory
If women hadn’t been in pre-history, we wouldn’t be here.
You asked me what I meant by “dominance”. Wolves give eye to control the prey they’re herding back to their website. Border Collies give eye to to sheep or even cattle & 2 ton bulls. Somehow the intense gaze of giving eye subdues the animal so it will go where the wolf or Collie directs. After 5 years of intensive observation i found thatnSkeezix gives eye to Scamp to make Scamp do what Skeezix wants. Dogs are amazingly adaptive. If a skill like giving eye is known in one canine, it can also be part of the repertoire of other canines, so its appearance even in Maltese is no surprise but Maltese don’t usually herd animals. (Although i know of one who herds the family’s cats) In Skeezix’s case, he uses “using eye”‘to make Scamp to make Scamp do certain things and to prevent him from doing others. This is a major discovery and should be the entry into explaining dog to dog communication. I’ve already told Adam Miklosi about this finding.
If you’d be amenable to read chapters of my book and commenting and critiquing on them, I’ll happily send you email attachments. You will be acknowledged in the Introduction and, where appropriate, your comments will be quoted
It’s been my observation that all dogs possess “the eye” to some extent, but it’s most pronounced in breeds originally developed for herding and guarding.
Insert “untamed” after “a”
There is absolutely no reason to see tolerance for starch at domestication as causally linked. There is no reason to apply to the proto dogs eating grains fed to them by hunter foragers before agriculture we managed to evolved increased amalyase production after the advent of agriculture there is no reason the dog couldn’t have existed as distinct entity from the wolf but without having yet developed increased amalyase production prior to agriculture.
Good post! I enjoy it when several knowledgeable people comment on a post.
Hominids had fire by the Pliocene, so cooked foods are far older than present day hominids realize. We now know there were wolves in Ethiopia from the times of the earliest pre-human remains found; they just haven’t been analyzed in context, but it is apparent that wolves and humanoids have shared the same environment for more than 4 million years, the time of Lucy, and probably long before.
One can speculate about ALL the different ways that humans and wolves interact and they probably did. It is possible to believe that wolves benefited from cooked food, too, and have had at least a million years of cooked food to digest. Plenty of time for wolves to naturally select for more of those starch digesters, which were probably the first changes to dogwolves from wolves.
Hominids and wolves were in multiple kinds of relationships since man stood up- and maybe he first stood up to better see and better to outwit and control the wolves.
And dog created man, haha. How about one was indispensable to the creation of the other?
Yes! People would not be what are today, had it not been for our co-evolution with our symbiotic partner, The Dog Who Was The Wolf. Perhaps we would still be small groups of rather ape-ish bipeds, squatting by our fires and fearful of the bears, lions, hyenas, etc., had it not been for our wolfish companions who made the journey through the ages with us.
I should have signed that “kate”, but they made me sign into my email account.
Oh, I agree with you that dogs were dogs long before people farmed. I’m writing a book, Dogs and Cilvilization, Those wolves who became dogs, I think, followed human scavengers and =hunters (early humans were both0, AND WHEN THEY INJURED and animal & it ran for cover, the dogs then sniffed it out and barked for the humans to kill it–and reward the dogs with fresh meat. BTW, Coppinger has changed his mind.
Now, I’m curious about that– what has Raymond Coppinger changed his mind about?
Hi Elaine
I’m another sol, lol! I looked at your blog. ;-)
If wolves and Australopithecenes shared the same landscape and ecology 4 million years ago, you can bet they were interacting long before humans evolved enough to leave middens for scavengers to eat.
What are the possible ways two species sharing the same habitat and probably pack structure and lifestyle can interact? The humanoids might have been wolf food in Lucy’s day, until they could finally beat wolves off of themselves and their catch with sticks, let alone off wolf-kills with sticks. And we all know the wolves will grab the human kills if a back is turned for a second, or there aren’t enough humanoids to guard it all.
There was an intense interaction going on between pre-humans and pre-dogs for eons before fire and cooked food. I think that the pre-dogs started sharing the stewpot because they were sharing the kill and that is when they started collecting the ability to digest grains. I’d call it evolutionary pressure to work out their competition for resources to their mutual benefit. I do not think it was hard for pre-people or pre-dogs to finally figure out how hunting the bigger game together was beneficial to both. And they probably did it long long, ago,before Neanderthal, let alone Cro-Magnon or modern cultivation.
I agree entirely that wolves who became dogs had started interacting possibly as far back as million ya, when Home habilis was inventing stone tools: cutters and scrapers. This indicates that they were already scavenging meat. The cutters allowed them to rush to a carcass, say of an elephant, which has to decay a few days before other scavengers can get through their tough hides. Homo habilis could cut through the hide right away. I think it’s entirely possible that canines, attracted by the dripping blood, followed these hominids back to their campsites. The canines easily learned that the the hominids left behind large bones, skin or other offal. The canines would then wait until the hominids either left the camp to scavenge more, or maybe even went to sleep. Then, the canines could “mop up” the refuse left by the hominids. That is a logical scenario of how canines, otherwise vicious dangers to hominids, could have become habituated to people. At first, people would have chased them away, so they’d stay largely out of sight. We used to hike the Appalachia Trail accompanied by our Chow. She never walked so that we could see her, but she knew where we were at all times. She’s walk in the woods, off trail so humans didn’t bother her. However, when our trail forked, somehow she knew that I have no sense of direction, and she’d suddenly appear on the trial, orienting her body in the direction I should take. (My husband was always far ahead of me.) Similarly, canines could have walked unseen near human scavengers and, later, hunters. You might be interested in the posts on the evolution of language on my other blog: http://smarthotoldlady.blogspot.com. Unlike my fellow Linguists, I believe that language began at least 2,000,000 million ya, with homo Erectus,or even further back, with Homo habiilis. We do know that all dogs today are descendants of small gray wolves. Wolves didn’t originate in Africa,but Homo erectus began migrating out of Africa early on. There are many more reasons for believing that pre-Homo sapiens and canines were interacting a long time before the earliest fossil dogs. For one thing, dogs are the only non human animal whose brain can segment the stream of human speech into words or phrases. Even chimps can’t do this. For this to have happened, the wolf brain had to develop the auditory decoding structures that allow dogs to understand some of human speech–and studies by researchers like Adam Miklosi have confirmed that dogs understand words and phrases in the stream of speech. It is not only intonation that they understand.
>>>>>>>>>> We used to hike the Appalachia Trail accompanied by our Chow. She never walked so that we could see her, but she knew where we were at all times. She’s walk in the woods, off trail so humans didn’t bother her >>>>>>>>>>> That’s so correct obvious – the way wild dogs moved along with scavengers-hunters-gatherers for ages in the husky history. They can watch / follow you in the wild – in the mood NOT intending to attack, but just observe and see, if you HAD something intresting to head for to / to offer. I’ve experienced the same behavior myself on semi-urban foxes.
Must bear in mind that in the past, there were MILLIONS of wolves in the Euraasia + Nothern Africa (when now some 100 000), so THAT was the style we walked with wolves and pro-dogs, it really was.
Bridget.
I’m sorry if I thought u were disagreeing. I agree with you. You are correct about no humans in the wild monitor humans–and humans often don’t realize it. When I lived in the Maine wilderness in the 1950’s, bobcats would quietly walk in trees overhead watching me, a
& when we lived in rural RI, if we walked at dusk, a large gray owl who nested in our woods would fly overhead, then perch on a tree & turn its head & watch as we walked. As we got nearer, he again soared ahead… Until we turned back to home.
Nice experiences.
The reason why people of our time get nervous about wild life observing/following them, makes sense in the context of our modernization – we are not on-the-tracks any more.
If we were, we could quite easily tell the difference between a hungry / dangerous beast and a curious / following beast.
Now when our scraps are put under a lid, if a beast dares to come to eat it, he’s kept as a hazard only.
Just reasoning why we are not able – don’t want to understand wolves’ behavior (or other wild life’s) anymore.
Elaine,
I visit your blog and find it lively and well-written :-). But I do not agree that dogs domesticated themselves; at least, I disagree that it was that simple. Certainly, wolves/dogwolves/dogs are excellent when it comes to opportunistically exploiting a ready food source, and scavenging from humans is that. But what many people seem to be forgetting or overlooking is that people DO take animals from the wild and keep them. They do this all over the world, and have for many millennia. The keeping of pets is part of the suite of traits that define us as humans.
The vast majority of pets taken from the wild, now and throughout history and prehistory, are isolated incidents which go no further than the individual animal involved. That is, the animal may be a successful pet, may even have served some other function too, such as wool animal, milk animal, hunting helper, draft animal, etc., but it was simply a tame individual and its taming did not lead to or influence domestication of a species. When that animal died or returned to the wild, that was the end of it. But a few animals adapted so well to human lifestyles that, even if they did revert to the wild as adults, they remained near human habitations, perhaps even following humans in their nomadic travels and occasionally interacting with humans. The young of these animals were exposed to humans in a different way than their brethren who had never been tamed; animals transmit acquired knowledge to their young (or if they are social animals, to their social group) and form established cultures that sometimes span many generations.
The wolves living today, persecuted for many generations by people, may be very different, mentally and emotionally, from the wolves living a hundred thousand years ago. One. Hundred. Thousand. Years. When you’re accustomed to hinking of geological time, that’s the wink of an eye, but in real terms as defined by the length of a human life, that’s an almost unimaginable length of time. Think of how the world has changed in just ONE thousand years – or even just one hundred years. People do occasionally, even today, take wolf puppies from the wild, tame them, and even hunt and herd with them. Not all such animals are suitable for those activities; probably most aren’t. A lot of that depends on the skill and empathy of the person involved in the animal’s education. Even wild wolves have to be educated in hunting or otherwise acquiring food, and even dogs bred for generations to a specific purpose have to be educated in order to perform that function well. More often than not, the young wolf’s or dog’s education involves being taught by an older, experienced animal, even if a human is involved as well. People would have placed a high value on wolves that did respond well to their training and also to wolves that would then pass that education along to “new hires”: Wolves accustomed in this way to hunting with people would have remained near them, just as wolves associated in a pack remain more or less together in denning areas
Puppies born near camp would no doubt have been observed from birth, and, given the human penchant for the novelty, any unusually colored or otherwise novel pups would have been taken and kept. This probably happened all over the world, everywhere wolves occurred. It’s possible that other canids were tamed, too, although apparently only wolves became ancestors of the dogs we have today. Not every animal produced offspring, of course, and there were many “dead ends”, but as people moved about and mingled, so did the canids travelling with them. This probably went on for many human generations, and many more canine generations. Then as now, there would have been some people more attuned to the animal, more adept at reading the animals’ communications, and better at coaxing usefulness from the animals.
Always with humans, one idea leads to another, and we can’t wait to share our ideas. We also can’t help extrapolating to see effect from cause, so much so that we often see it when it isn’t there. Sure, wolves/dogwolves/dingoes/dogs scavenged from human dumps, latrines, and middens, but domestication took participation & intense involvement from both sides. People haven’t made intense attempts to domesticate other animals such as bears or jackals; probably those animals could be domesticated, given enough time, effort, and deliberate selection, but something in those ancient wolves spoke to a kindred spirit. The dump-diving was incidental to the domestication, not causal.
I’m sorry if you think I think that dogs self-domestication was simple. I don’t. I think it was a gradual process over thousand or even millions of years ago. For a long time, dogs would have quietly tracked hominids, just waiting for the chance to rush into campsites and scarf up remaining bones, hides, and offal–and also human fecal matter which contains a large amount of nutritiou waste. This is because, in order to become upright, hominids lost a large portion of their intestines, so whatever they ate didn’t have time to be fully digested. This is one reason that Hominids over 2,000,000k ya became carnivorous. It takes longer to fully digest vegetable matter than it does to convert meat into usable protein. Meat also contributed to the expansion of the human brain.
I notice in this thread discussions of how dogs became able to digest starches. That could have happened as a result of dogs eating human feces, which contained partially digested vegetable matter. BTW, foxes eat berries. I’ve owned a lot of dogs who ate grass and other vegetation in the garden–and in the woods. Dogs are actually omnivorous. What I don’t know is whether wolves eat vegetation. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. I’ve also had cats who loved things like cantaloupe and berries, although they supposedly are strict carnivores. I suspect that a lot of carnivores round out their diets with vegetables and fruits.
” For a long time, dogs would have quietly tracked hominids, just waiting for the chance to rush into campsites and scarf up remaining bones, hides, and offal–and also human fecal matter which contains a large amount of nutritiou waste. ”
How can you claim this? You think the pre-humans (if you can make your mind as to which pre-humans did what) didn’t track the wolves as well? Just waiting for them to kill something so they could grab it? Meat eating in larger amounts became more useful if it was cooked.
BTW wolves have been observed eating berries and melons and probably a whole lot of other stuff. They are omnivores, because they need the contents of herbivores intestines to meet their veggie, and maybe starch, requirement.
Hi Dr. Chaika. I don’t know you very well and will be curious to check out your blogs. But what stands out to me at a glance, is that your phrasing suggests certain things are defniitely known and that the case is closed, Most good science continues to state most things are “theory” because every discovery brings about new questions. THis is especially true when we talk about the much distant past, even with things like carbon dating and so forth, a lot of the evidence we wish we had is lost to the dust.
I also cringe when I hear the term “omnivorous” applied to dogs or wolves or even fox, even if they DO consume plant matter. It might be semantics to the average pet owner, but I do think terms like “omnivorous’ and “facultative carnivore” each carry nuances that affect how one thinks about diet.
“Omnivore” is a much more sweeping, generalist term. There are many types of omnivores and they all land on different ends of the nutritional spectrum. True generalists include bears, pigs, rats, seagulls, corvids, raccoons. They truly seem to do equally well on everything. Dogs do better on vegetable matter than a cat would, but historically canids depend primarily on meat. To term them as simply an omnivore rather than a facultative carnivore, I think, would give the impression that most dogs should be eating just as much veggie matter as meat. Humans, well, they turned hunter for many speculated reasons no doubt important for survival at the time, and many of the speculations are excellent but I don’t think anyone has ultimately determined the chief reason yet. Also the “gatherer” part of the hunter-gatherer equation is often conveniently left out.
In our modern world with humans living longer than ever, it’s being found that in the long term, over years and years, much of the diseases of old age, chiefly heart disease, are atributed to excessive meat consumption. That would not have been a problem for humans living in an ice age where you were lucky to make it past childhood. But the long lives now show that human bodies can only make it so long on heavy meat diets, which is cause for review of what our diet should really be in the modern world.
Conversely, unless a dog has a specific problem such as allergies to all meat proteins, or need for an incredibly low fat diet, dogs that live into old age do not have the same issues as humans with respect to meat consumption. Heavy reports of elderly dogs with cholesterol issues, needing triple bypasses, just don’t seem to exist. I would not doubt if an occasional cholesterol issue showed up, but it’s just not that common and in fact, heavy meat eating, is not definitely shown to be causal that I know of. At least, not indisputably.
Facultative carnivore puts the dog on the right path of the spectrum; TECHNICALLY omnivorous but far and away, primarily carnivore, with the abilty to make use of vegetation.
Oh, also, there is a previous blog post here titled “Dogs evolved to eat grains” with many statements that wolves have been spotted eating plant matter. I noticed you said you did not know if wolves consume such things.
Dr. Ellen Dierenfeld, animal nutritionist and former chief of nutrition at The Bronx Zoo, found that the red deer of Scotland scavenge dead seabirs off the coast. I’m not sure that makes them “omnivores” yet they make use of this food source. One would still tend to classify them as herbivores, based on their taxonomy, biochemistry and anatomy if nothing else.
Yep there are gradations to carnivory. I believe it was Mark Derr (Scottie will correct me if I’m wrong) who used the terms hypercarnivore and hypocarnivore to describe felines and canids.–the hypo indicating that the animals in question, though primarily carnivores, did include vegetable matter in their diets on a regular basis.
In re the meat consumed by early canids and hominids, we must keep in mind that it would have been relatively low (as compared to today’s corn-fed livestock) in the kind of saturated fats that do us in so thoroughly. A number of years ago now, I read a paper about a Euroamerican couple in NW Canada (or maybe Alaska), who subsisted primarily on game (something on the order of 80% of their diet), yet presented absolutely no evidence of coronary/arterial disease. As I recall, doctors attributed this to three things: the relatively low amount of saturated fat in the game they consumed; their very active lifestyle; and the rigors of spending so much time outdoors in a very cold climate. It’d be interesting to know how the Metis who has been featured in these pages in the past, would stack up in this regard.
Urban Collie Chick,
I think I’ll amend your previous saying….
Dogs are facultative Omnivores.
Simply because their physical structure… from the layout of their teeth to the entire digestive system… is setup for processing meat.
Given the various shades of “omnivore”, you can feel free to switch terms as you wish. But the very term “omnivore” in itself defines the ability to eat from the various food groups, making the adjective “facultative” redundant, in my eyes.
Kittenz, if you think humans are only beings keeping pets you are wrong.
http://www.divinecaroline.com/33/50203-food-friend-animals-adopt-species/2
http://primatology.net/2010/07/05/do-animals-keep-pets/
The last link is good for questioning what do we mean by “keeping pets”? Or, is it the stockholm syndrome for the pet ? Well, we also know ants keeping Aphididae as their cattle, so step back a bit.
I mostly agree with kittenz, esp about dump diving being incidental or developing much later. I think there are also other ways the two species interacted she didn’t mention.
I think it was highly likely to have been far longer ago than 100k years, given recent advances in understanding when pre-men used fire. More like a million years ago is the academic opinion. Actually, the Pleistocene has been expanded to 2.3 million years ago to the end of the ice ages. It used to be considered to be the last million years before the end of the glaciation periods. Lucy’s people were pre-Pleistocene at 3.5-5 million y/a. Fire came into use with Homo Erectus about 1 million y/a. Dates are approximate, but within the ball park.
So I think most of the cultural developments of the Pleistocene were begun about 1million y/a with Homo Erectus or closely related prehumans. Fire and cooking are considered as evolutionary boosters that resulted in much bigger brains, for one thing. Men (and women) who could control fire could also control wolves in several ways. So I put the cooperative stage between wolves and man to have begun at least 1,000,000y/a.
Although trained as a cultural anthropologist, I have been on this evolution of man thingy since I was 15 in 1956, when no one really knew anything. I can leap to conclusions and extrapolate as I wish because I am not an academic.
Academia has made the discoveries but is far from definite conclusions. Elaine is essentially an academic who has been under Coppinger’s sway which was an academically safe thing to do, for years. She also adopted Elisabeth Marshall Thomas’ attitude toward dogs, which is to anthropomorphize them, almost to Disney proportions. That is attribute human characteristics to every dog behavior. The Secret Life of Dogs, and the Hidden Life of Dogs read very much like Elaine’s own blog. Now, I like EMT’s fiction, but her dog books contribute only to creating human-like cartoon characters of her own dogs. She was loathe to train them, in this “experiment” so people in the community,had to put up with her run away husky, multiple times. She felt ‘entitled’ to having the police bring him back home, LOL.
Excuse me! I have never been an admirer of Elizabeth Marshall. Or of Meg Olmert, nor have I ever been “under” the influence of Ray Coppinger’ 2001 book. I disagreed totally with his statements that behavior is not inborn. In his book, he devotes a whole chapter to “proving” that any dog can be trained to do anything, but at the end of the book, he says that Border Collies are so hyper and ‘give eye'” even to passing cars, that they shouldn’t be pets. Have you read my blogs on Skeezix & Scamp’s tactics to get larger treats? It is a far cry from that nonsense of “secret lives of dogs.” I studied these two for over 5 years trying to see how they communicated without words, besides the obvious body motion cues. In my blog, I said I didn’t know how they did it, but I knew there had to be some ways dogs communicated with each other. A friend of mine, sitting on the cellar stairs, watching S & S as I was standing, paying the dogs no attention, but eating cookies, said to me “There’s something going on with those two.” I looked down and saw Skeezix looking intently–“giving eye”–to Scamp, who was opposite him, about 3 feet away. As I looked over at Scamp, he stood on his hind legs and began walking forwards & backwards & to the right & left, which is how he begs for food. We had both noticed that Skeezix stopped begging for food after Scamp was a few months old, but Scamp always begged. Skeezix had noticed that if we gave Scamp a tidbit, we also always gave one to Skeezix, even if he hadn’t begged. Now, we’ve confirmed that Skeezix “commanded” Scamp to beg (among other things) by “giving eye” to Scamp. That has explained other interactions between them as well, such as Skeezix standing at the door of my study while Scamp comes in, & as Skeezix watches, Scamp fetches me. As I rise from my chair, Scamp runs to Skeezix & they both lead me downstairs either to have me let them out or to give them a treat they think they deserve. (The mechanics of that are also discussed in my blog.)
“Giving eye” is well-known wolf and dog behavior, associated with herding. What we’ve discovered is that the dominant dog use it to make the other one do or not do something. For instance, we got Scamp 18 months after Skeezix. We noticed that when Skeezix lay snuggled up to me or my mate, Scamp always went to the opposite end of the couch.n Similarly, Skeezix snuggles up to me in bed, but Scamp always lay at the foot of the bed. We used to joke that Skeezix established “snuggle rights,” , making sure that Scamp could’t snuggle. (These are Maltese, and being companions by snuggling to their humans is seriious business.) As I said, we thought of it as a joke. I did know Scamp wanted to snuggle because, occasionally, when Skeezix left the room, Scamp would run up to me & start licking me. Now we know that Skeezix warned Scamp against snuggling by “giving eye.” Nothing mysterious about it. It’s well-documented canine behavior in controlling other animals. What is interesting is that a dog doesn’t have to be a sheep dog to “give eye.” He just has to be the dominant dog, in this case, Skeezix is dominant by being older, being our pet longer, and also by being over double Scamp’s size.
I was reading your “giving eye” scenarios in the last paragraph. Your description of today’s definitions of “dominance” is something I find a bit confusing. Behaviorists today have established that dominance is about access to resources, not about direct control of the actions of another dog, wolf, etc.
So when you say Skeezix liked to establish “snuggle rights”, that sounds like Skeezix being dominant to Scamp when it comes to you as a resource; Skeezix gets you first. That’s all good.
When you say “It’s well-documented canine behavior in controlling other animals”, that sounds like a fallback to old, inaccurate ways of thinking about dominance.
Which “dominance” camp are you in?
Wolves that herd large ungulates back to their dens for the kill, use “giving eye” as the means to control the prey to go where the wolf herds it to. The 30 pound Border Collie who gives eye to a 2800 pound bull to make it go into I its stall, is controlling the bull’s behavior. In the latter case, the dog gets no extra reward by dominating the bull, and, in the former, the wolf could just kill the prey as it wants. He herds it so he doesn’t have to drag it back to the den. In terms of food, the wolf’s controlling the behavior of the prey yields no more access to resources than just killing off the prey right away.
There is no difference between dominance to access resources vs dominance to control animal behavior.
I am not a behaviorist,
Well…. I would say that when a wolf gives the eye to a large ungulate to herd it to a den or other area where it can be more efficiently consumed, it is maximizing its access to resources, because it could not carry so much food back to the den, especially if the food animal is very large.
Oh, to me it sounds all practical idea of any leader’s behavior .
What’s the problem speaking about the dominance and the leadership in a pack / group ? Since these “new” dog-training schools have come to markets, I’ve seen bad-behaving dogs 50% more than before. I’ve seen it’s only due to the ridiculous weak, non-existing leadership that prevails in too many heads.
Are you denying that wolves and dogs, probably among other predators, “give eye” to get another animal do what they want? Do you have research to refute this? This is well-established in studies of canines. Also, you sayi that “it sounds all practical idea of any leader’s behavior…” Pray tell an instance of ordinary humans using special eye control to elicit co-operation or dominance (in either of its meanings). The only analog I know of is professional hypnotists. Human more often control and instantiate dominance through language skills.
I use “eye control” all the time … it’s called (by those on the receiving end) “the Mom look”. And it works. Well, it works most of the time.
Why oh why did you get me wrong, when I was commenting and along it, agreeing your stories about your Malteses’ behaviour ? Read my short comment again – I was agreeing those facial (eye) gestures are dominant communication. And are practical = energy saving tools for a leader.
(Phew)
That comment was adressed to Elaine Ostrach Chaika, PhD.
What part of that statement is relevant to me? Starting with the giving eye thing, it has nothing to do with anything I actually said.
While I did not do anything but a cursory reading for both your blog and Marshall, there is a a similar anthropomorphizing going on, as in your essay on dogs feeling entitled. That is so cute, but it is an interpretation of a dog behavior that may have a more practical origin, such as that many dogs I have known, especially my toys, know the schedule and what time it is and what happens at a certain time. They then anticipate it and let me know if I am off schedule. I don’t call that feeling entitled, I call it telling the time and know the routine to the minute. If I am late, they let me know, but I don’t interpret it as “feeling entitled”
An aside on entitlement in my own pack: When I first got my pill alarm, it went off at the same times everyday and I took my pills. My Chi at the time started reacting to the alarms. So I started saying, “time to take a pill” and took it, and then I said, “Time to get a treat” and got him one. He learned that trick in one day and would even wake me up when my deaf ear was up when the alarm went off. Not only that, he taught it to a little dog we got, later. When he died, she took over the job, then handed it down to the next generation and when he moved out, the next generation took it up with no training except learning from the other dogs. These guys know the schedule, they know the routine and anything unusual gets their attention. They would often anticipate my 4 o’clock pill time and show up a few minutes early and wait.
If you in any way hold to the “wolves in dumps” theory, you are under the sway of Coppinger. Sorry, but there is a whole new world out there, starting with Mark Derr’s “How the dog became the dog”. I think you would love it.
If you read the blog on dog’s having a sense of entitlement, you would have seen how their behavior is described and how it is different from just expecting to be fed at certain times. There is also a study that shows that dogs have a sense of fairness–which is part of feeling entitled
EOC I can’t get over the fact that you are anthropomorphizing the behaviors yet acting as through that were scientific. That is exactly what EMT did. As I said, it is cute.
You are interpreting their body language into human terms. And you are the first and only to put forth this theory about dog entitlement.
What dogs/wolves were included in this study? Unless it includes several subspecies of wolves with several unrelated individuals of each, ditto with a wide selection of primitive dogs and modern breeds developed in different parts of the world, it’s not even half of the picture.
As for speculation of how wolves became dogs, there’s no reason why this particular adaptation didn’t happen around the advent of agriculture, but no way does that mean that was the exact point when humans domesticated some wolves and got dogs. I think it was Einstein that said “Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler”. The above seems nice and neat, but it’s just far too simplistic.
Anthropology is fun. The sparse outline provided by the data makes for so many plausible stories, and so much debate.
Who is to say that many patterns were developing simultaneously. In one population the symbiotes were essentially waste producers and waste feeders, in another, they shared the nest as well as the meals. Some eventually (much later) rejected the symbiotes as “unclean” …perhaps in conjunction with engineering of effective sanitation engineering. Some cultures hunt prey that are hard to catch without a dot to track and chase. Others may have found dogs more of a nuisance than a boon. Still others caught on to putting dogs to the harness … Or using them as a highly portable foodstuff that could survive on a highly varied diet.
It isn’t one way or another now. Dogs fulfill different roles in different households, and in different cultures. I have a hunch it was at least as diverse in pre-history.
One thing I don’t understand in the above discussion is why so many people equate starch to grain. It’s been decades since I read an ethnography, but I seem to remember many more cultures that ate roots than grains.
I agree on all of it Jen! Personally I have found these discussions stimulating, whether or not all agree with each other. It’s been passionate AND intelligent at the same time.
And yes, I also think people forget about roots and tubers with respect to starch. Did everyone forget about the famed Irish Potato famine? :)
“Starch = grain”? Not I ! Tubers and other rootstocks have always been sources of nutrition for humans (and, by extension, for other hominids), and are often the “fall-back” when no other nutrition can be found. They’ve also been used as sources of water where no open water was available, Then there are all the legumes that people consume, too, as well as nuts and other foods high in starches.
When I think of people living nomadic lives, before the widespread cultivation of grain (i.e., “bread plants”), I imagine them walking, sometimes with babies and small children swaying in slings or on their backs, each carrying a bag made of animal skin or woven grass and a sharpened digging stick. Dogs would have been ranging off to the side or quartering out front to flush food animals from hiding or predators from fresh kills, or perhaps even finding buried tubers for the people to dig up & share out. Perhaps the group, when they came across swaths of ripening grain, used their skin bags for cooking, adding water and dropping heated rocks into the bag to cook the grain – uncooked grain is hard to digest. The dogs would consume scraps and any leftover food, along with human feces, just as will dogs today, given the opportunity, and they would also have caught and eaten insects, rodents, rabbits, fawns, and other small animals.
The people would probably have camped for awhile to exploit local vegetable foods in season, then moved on, and may have had traditional seasonal hunting grounds. Some tribes may have discovered ways to use their dogs as draft animals, at least for hauling meat and bones; others may have discovered that the dogs’ shed woolly undercoat fur could be twisted into yarn, much the same as they twisted plant stems and fibers to make rope. These people didn’t have the accumulated millennia of technology that we have, but they were no less intelligent, inventive, and resourceful than modern humans. Perhaps they had other animals traveling with them here and there; I have read of a tribal family in New Guinea keeping a semi-tame pet cassowary, and it’s not a stretch for me to think that prehistoric people kept the occasional fawn, calf, foal, kid, or piglet, long before those animals were actually domesticated. They may have noticed how their dogs interacted with these animals & at some point, someone realized that they could keep entire flocks of animals with the help of the dogs.
And of course, through all of this vast span of time, dogs were surely friends, pets, and playmates. Children who grew up with dogs would have accepted dogs as part of the group, and would in turn have raised their children to feel the same way. No doubt they had other pets as well; tribal people all over the world keep pets, usually taken from the small animals & birds living wild around them: parrots, genets, small canids and cats of various kinds, lizards, pheasants; the list goes on and on. The one animal that almost all tribal groups have and have had in common, though all the ages, is the dog.
Somewhere and somewhen during this long companionship of our two species, some dogs came to be able to more efficiently digest starchy foods. Maybe this change did occur after agriculture became widespread; maybe this change was one of the things that allowed people to develop such a proliferation of different types of dogs (do various types of dogs all share enhanced ability to produce amylase? I don’t think this study was broad enough to answer that question). But the mutual process of the dog’s domestication must surely have occurred long before most humans became agrarian rather than nomadic.
Hear, Hear Jen! It wasn’t one or another, but almost certainly all of the above (and some we haven’t thought of yet.)
And those starches weren’t limited to just roots and tubers but included the pith of some trees and cycads, some fruits (ala breadfruit) and many non-graminiferous seeds such as amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat and the pulses.
That’s What I figured…. If the topic stated Dogs evolved to eat grains then there is a difference. But if it was titled that dogs evolved from wolves to better handle complex starches on their own. Then it makes more sense.
Even Chimps have 2 genes for the production of Amylase. They also have to supplement in order to manage the breakdown of these starches. And Chimps do eat young ungulates as well as other small creatures. IE: Squirrels, Monkeys…etc etc.
Humans have an average of 15 genes for the production of amylase… The same as some dogs.
They are just as capable of handling starches as we are.
And that would give them an advantage… since they can better manage gaining usable energy from a wider variety of food sources than a strictly meat only diet.
Whereas Wolves require supplementary sources of amylase….. dogs can produce it on their own.
That is evolution.
We had an limbing male wolf in the South-East Finland. He went for the carbage in a suburban to search for food.
This had been going on for weeks, late last year, maybe for moths, until people get worried, called the police – who shot it.
The Finnish wolf is greatly endangered. so that wasn’t the best thing to do.
I doubt is that tolerance for eating grain so meaningful here in the domestication debate. We have evidence wolves eating carbage, many owners feed their wolves with quite basic kibble.
The principal in the question is the grain you give to your dog / wolf must be COOKED.
Let’s think it via human domestication: homos used to ate raw, but when they learnt to cook, especially the meat, they DID benefit from it so much more it became the preveiling culture. Our tropical-fruit-eaters-based-body can benefit much better the proteins, than if it was raw.
I have not heard of any (healthy) dog who can eat grain only for all his life without getting sick.
BUT, I know a wolf can survive one harsh winter only by EATING moose shit or carbage, like in that case from Finland i told you before.
So this is really diverse animal, the wolf. I hope the genotypes will preserve, tho much have been killed away.
I haven’t time yet to see that dog DNA / amylaze – study, but I what I mean is that it can’t be the question of mutation in the genes only, since we know wolves can eat cooked grain, along with other vegetables. What’s the difference between a moose’s shit and a rye bread – only added salt lacking. LOL ?
P.S.
I don’t feel I had to touch the problem with our modern modiefied specie of grain / veges. They are remarkable different from those we had 10 000 yrs ago and that fact causes dietary problems even to us humans.
Glutens–proteins found in graminiferous species. Grain porridge, bread, etc. contains glutens but would not contain the amylase necessary to digest same. Moose poop would since herbivores produce amylase in their saliva, and since Moose are ruminants, the ingested grain would be returned to the mouth in the form of a cud to be further chewed and broken down before finally being turned in to Moose poop.
In the baking process, natural (or added) yeasts FORM amylase to the cooked product. So again I say this – there’s really no much difference between herbvoras poop and a good bread.
By “good bread” here I mean a product that’s considered most healthy, like (cooked) spelt or (cooked) rye.
If the amylase produced in raising/baking bread neutralized all the gluten/gliadin, then the sensitivity experienced by so many people and animals when eating bread wouldn’t occur. Among people, there are at least 4 types of negative immune responses to the gluten proteins in the Triticeae family of grains (wheat, rye, barley). I would assume the same applies to canids. I would also assume, based on the genetic data cited in the report that generated this post, that grain sensitivity among dogs and wolves, as with people, varies from population to population and individual to individual.
On the other hand, the amount of chewing–thus the continuous reintroduction of amylase to the cud–would greatly reduce, if not eliminate, this problem in Moose poop.
BTW: Though spelt does agree w/ some otherwise gluten-intolerant people it disagrees w/ others. And yes you’re right, modern varieties of wheat contain much more gluten than spelt, rye or barley–that’s why they work so well for baking bread. But for some individuals, as with peanuts, even a little is way too much. Having gluten-intolerant individuals in my family, and having had pets w/ food allergies, we’re very tuned into this issue. In feeding our pets, we avoid the potential problems of gluten intolerance by feeding them grain-free foods–our choice–it works for us.
Agree.
My family too is intolerant to grain to a some amount. I feed my dog with BARF and with a little bit of rye bread. Kibble doesn’t fit at all, even when it’s non-wheat. I think it’s due to the internal habit of the digestial flora.
BTW, someone was talking there about people brest-feeding pups and so the human amylase transferring into the body of the dog. Well, don’t you think that when they certainly ate the human poop, they got enuf amylase to tolerate the cooked grains ? During the following tens of thousands of yrs, those who tolarated it better, became the majority.
A modern adult, weighting 60 kilograms poops ab. 200 grams per day. An ancient human family of 15 individuals living nearby, means 3 kilos pure poop a day, 21 kg per week. It does smell and allures other animals to feed it, especially dogs, who indeed are natural poop eaters.
The modern bread wheat contains remarkable more gluten than those ancient specie like spelt wheat, or the rye. High gluten content is the problem to species like us or our dogs, too – our natural amylaze production can’t give a response .
I’ve seen literally tens of maniacally poop-eating dogs. I can see how the ancient wolves we allured – consiously and not – to come to us were lonely / young, poop-eating ones. A lonely dog is bad pray catcher, and so it doesn’t have much choice. Eat shit, or take a risk and join in .
Here’s another recent genetic study that may be of interest some of you: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=126735&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
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