• Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Patreon
  • Premium Membership
  • Services

Natural History

by Scottie Westfall

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« The persistent myth of the English origins of the Eastern red fox
Is the Virginia opossum the only marsupial native to North America? »

The problem with using modern wolves in dog domestication studies

October 24, 2017 by SWestfall3

gordon buchanan wolf

Gordon Buchanan with a wild arctic wolf on Ellsmere. Photo by the BBC.

For really long time, the mystery of human bipedalism vexed us. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, are all knuckle-walking apes, and there was an assumption that the common ancestor of all three species was a knuckle-walker. At some point, the lineage that led to our species rose up on its hind legs, perhaps to make it easier to gaze over tall grass, and we became bipedal.

The current thinking, though, is that humans never derived from any knuckle-walking ape. Instead, the common ancestor of humans, chimps, and bonobos was likely a brachiator.  The modern brachiators are the gibbons and siamangs, the so-called “lesser apes.” These animals are highly arboreal, and because they lack tails, they rely upon their long limbs to move swiftly through the trees. When on the ground, brachiators walk bipedally, swinging their long arms to the side for balance.

Humans evolved bipedalism from these brachiators, while the chimps and bonobos became knuckle-walkers. In this scenario, humans never were knuckle-walkers, and it is misleading to think that humans rose up on our hind-legs from creatures that moved like chimpanzees.

What does this have to do with dogs?

Well, there have been quite a few studies that have compared dogs and wolves that have been imprinted on humans from an early age in hopes that we might figure out the domestication process from studying how tamed wolves behave when compared to domestic dogs.

These are interesting studies, but I think they oversell what they can answer.

It should be of no secret that I am very much a skeptic of the Raymond Coppinger model of dog domestication. His model contends that dogs necessarily evolved from scavenging wolves that gradually evolved not to fear people and then became village dogs. Our specialized breeds are thus derived from village dogs that were later selectively bred.

Coppinger thought that wolves were just too hard to domestic without this scavenger-to-village dog step that lies between truly wild wolves and their evolution to domestic dogs.

Modern wolves are hard to tame. They must be bottle-raised from an insanely early age.  Coppinger thought that it would be impossible for people living during the Pleistocene to provide that kind of care for young wolf pups.

Like the people who assumed that humans evolved from knuckle-walkers, Coppinger assumed that wolves that exist today are good models for what wolves were like during the Pleistocene. These wolves are reactive and nervous to the point of being paranoid. It is well-known that many wolves won’t even attempt to den near human settlements, and if they catch wind of humans, they soon leave.

These animals would not be easily tamed by anyone, much less people living with Stone Age hunter-gatherer technology.

I generally accepted his arguments, and in the early days of this site, I largely parroted them.

A few years ago, I was watching a documentary about the tigers of the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest that straddles the border between India and Bangladesh. These tigers are notorious for their man-eating behavior, and there have been many theories posited about why these tigers so readily hunt man. Among these is the argument that the Sundarbans tigers drink so much salt in their water intake that it destroys their kidneys, which disables them and makes them more likely to hunt man.

But the documentary contended that the real reason these tigers are more likely to hunt man is that all other tigers descend from populations where humans have hunted them heavily. In British India, tiger hunting was a popular activity among the colonial administrators, and this intensive hunting cause tiger populations to drop.  This hunting left behind only tigers that had some genetic basis to fear man more, and thus, man-eating tigers are exceedinlg rare now.

The Sundarbans never received this hunting pressure, so the tigers left behind had the same innate tendencies to hunt humans that the ancestral tiger population possessed.

I found this argument utterly intriguing, and I began to weigh it against what I knew about wolves. Wolves across their range have experienced even more persecution than tigers have.  In North America, we have four hundred years of humans coming up with more and more creative ways to kill them. In Eurasia, this persecution has gone on for thousands of years.

The persecution of wolves surely has had some effect in how wolves behave, including their innate tendency to accept humans and other novel stimuli in their environment.

Wolves are often so fearful that they won’t cross roads.  They just avoid people at all costs, and it just seems that this is an animal that we couldn’t possibly domesticate or even habituate to our presence.

This has led some people to suggest that dogs aren’t derived from wolves, but some Canis x creature that is related to dogs and wolves, but it is ancestral to the former but not the latter.

Genome comparisons have shown that such claims really don’t work. Dogs are derived from an archaic wolf population, and in this way, they are sort of genetic living fossils, holding the genomes of a Pleistocene wolves that no longer exist. But these wolves that became dogs were still part of Canis lupus, and thus, we have to maintain dogs as part of Canis lupus as well in order to retain the monophyly of the species.

Except for dogs that have modern wolf ancestry, no dog is actually derived from a wolf population that exists today.

And the wolf populations that exist today just seem so hard to tame and work with that it makes sense then to consider the need for Coppinger’s scavenging wolf-to-village dog stage between wild wolves and modern dogs.

The thing is, these studies using modern wolves are only using wolves that are derived from these heavily persecuted populations, and it is very unlikely that these animals are representative of the wolves that lived during the Pleistocene.

We know that when wild dogs have never experienced human hunting, they are intensely curious about us. Timothy Treadwell had a pack of tame red foxes that followed him around like dogs while he was off communing with the brown bears. Darwin killed the fox that was named after him by sneaking up on one and hitting it with a geological hammer.

Lewis and Clark came onto the American prairies where there were vast hordes of wolves lying about.  The wolves had no fear of people, and one wolf was actually killed when it was enticed in with meat and speared in the head with a spontoon.

After these wolves experienced the persecution of Western man, the only wolves left in the populations were those that were extremely wary and nervous.

In fact, the only wolves that exist now that have never experienced widespread persecution by man are the white wolves that live in the Canadian High Arctic.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching two documentaries about these wolves. The first was by Jim Brandenburg.  Brandenburg and L. David Mech spent a summer living with and filming wolves on Ellesmere.  These wolves showed no fear of them, and they allowed them to observe their natural behavior in the wild, including allowing them near their den sites.

Virtually the same documentary was recently made by Gordon Buchanan of the BBC. Buchanan came to Ellesmere and became accepted by a wolf pack, which eventually trusted him enough to allow him to babysit their pups while the adults hunted.

These wolves hunt arctic hare and muskox. They live hard lives, but because they have no real history with man, they are oddly curious and trusting of people.

It seems to me that these wolves are much more like those described by Lewis and Clark, and they are likely to have behaved much like the ancient Pleistocene wolves did. They had never undergone extensive persecution by man, and thus, they were probably quite curious about man.

If these ancient wolves were more like the Ellesmere wolves, then it seems domestication would have been a pretty easy process. In fact, it appears to me that it is so easy to have happened that the struggle would have been preventing it from happening in the first place.

So if these High Arctic wolves are a better model for the ancient wolves that led to dogs, why aren’t they included in the studies?

Well, these wolves are hard to access, and what is more, because they represent such a special population, it might not be wise to remove any of these wolves from the wild.

So the socialized and imprinted wolf pup studies really can’t be performed on them.

But we could still get DNA samples from them and compare their behavior-linked genes to those of dogs and wolves from persecuted populations.

All these other studies are ever going to do is tell you the difference between dogs and certain wolves from persecuted populations. They aren’t really going to tell you the full story of why dogs came to behave differently from wolves.

So for the sake of science, we need to understand that evolution through artificial selection has affected wolves as well as dogs. Dogs have been bred to be close to man. Wolves have been selected through our persecution to be extremely fearful and reactive.

So as interesting as these studies are, they have a big limitation, and the assumption that these wolves represent what ancient wolves were like is major methodological problem.

 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Posted in dog domestication, dogs, wild dogs, wolves | Tagged arctic wolves, dog domestication, Raymond Coppinger, white wolves | 12 Comments

12 Responses

  1. on October 24, 2017 at 9:33 pm DAC

    I agree with this completely.


  2. on October 25, 2017 at 6:29 am dtermijn

    Great explanation, I guess that the hormones ( stress) and the neurotransmitter system can also show different levels because of the reason that fear plays a role in some populations ( generations) in relation to us humans.


  3. on October 25, 2017 at 9:31 am Robert McCleary

    Believe you to be absolutely correct ! I, too, have read of the friendliness and curiosity of wolves before the white man headed west in any numbers. The Native Americans ‘never’ hunted wolves and actually revered them. Lewis and Clark journals spoke of wolves entering their camps to ‘nose around’. After reading the Dan Flores books I came to the same conclusion that you did.

    bob mccleary, Delta Colorado

    On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 4:51 PM, Natural History wrote:

    > retrieverman posted: ” For really long time, the mystery of human > bipedalism vexed us. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and the > bonobos, are all knuckle-walking apes, and there was an assumption that the > common ancestor of all three species was a knuckle-walker. At some” >


  4. on October 27, 2017 at 12:13 am Dennis

    Belyayev’s domestication of wild foxes in Russia proceeded along lines suggested by the “campfire wolf” story. That tamed fox population still exists as evidence that husbandry of captive foxes can result in domestication. The Ellesmere wolves may be an example of how domestication starts but control of breeding lines to foster domestication would still be necessary as it was in the Russian experiment.


    • on October 27, 2017 at 2:16 am retrieverman

      There are some methodological problems with the Belyaev fox experiments too. I don’t think they are necessarily the best models. I actually suspect that persecution has fundamentally changed the critical period windows in wolves (at least in most of them), and that the original Pleistocene wolves were just much easier to habituate to humans.

      Mark Derr has written a lot about issues with the Belyaev experiment : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dogs-best-friend/201708/rip-self-taming-dump-divers


    • on October 27, 2017 at 2:18 am retrieverman

      I suspect that arctic wolves have longer critical periods for socialization.

      I have another problem with Coppinger and that is the assumption that village dogs are the model organism to show what original dogs were like. The problem is that those village dogs do not live, for the most part, in hunter-gatherer societies. Many live in places where dogs are pests or are hated due to cultural or religious practice. But origin of the dog is not in cultures like that. It was in cultures more like the indigenous Australians or the Inuit. Those are cultures that valued dogs for their hunting ability, as well as their other uses.


      • on October 27, 2017 at 2:34 am retrieverman

        I think the model dogs that explain what the original dogs were like are the laikas of Russia. The dog originated somewhere along the taiga and steppe regions of Eurasia during the Pleistocene, and the dogs that are used by traditional cultures for that purpose in the same eco-region (just shifted to the north during the Holocene) are the laikas.


      • on October 27, 2017 at 2:47 am retrieverman

        Also check out Darcy Morey and Rujana Jeger’s work, including this paper : http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08912963.2016.1262854


  5. on October 27, 2017 at 5:43 am andres

    nice post, but i should say something…just to try to find the point of this discussion, when actually the likely options are as acceptable as the unlikely ones:

    1) “These are interesting studies, but I think they oversell what they can answer.” >> Welcomed to science nowadays!!

    2) whether Coppinger is right or not is variable and certainly not definitive. His final hypothesis (as you presented it) cannot be ruled out, is totally possible that dogs evolved from scavenging wolves that gradually evolved not to fear people and then became village dogs. Also, multiple differing hypothesis are not temporally and physically exclusive. Species, as you also know, dont attach to one behavior only, especially in social mammals, and hence circumstances may change drastically depending on population extension, local experiences, and/or genetic variation. This tell us that variation in wolf’s behavior, as packs and as individuals, is already high today and yesterday (past). Try to establish only one repertory of strategies for wolves in the past is just not realistic. Additionally, and also importantly, human behavior at that time also may be quite variable, regardless the general aspects of a nomadic or settled group. So is not possible to say what intention was predominant in those groups at that time (maybe a hunter needed/used dogs; maybe a children adopted them at the village/camp; maybe both). This means that in both sides (the wolf and the human side) there are so many ways to explain the trajectory of a behavior and interaction, that it may not be relevant (neither possible) to know the exact pathway of how these events occurred. Trying to find only one explanation will only constraint our vision on species interactions, making this particular phenomenon to be restricted to only one idea of cooperation/symbiosis. I really think that symbiosis between humans and dogs can occur in several ways, and that should be the focus of the research; which ways are less invasive, less harmful for any of the species involved; and more prone to occur in certain circumstances. I’m sure there are many studies involving some of these aspects, but ultimately to find an answer for the past rather than for our present and future, which is more relevant i think.
    3) Try to find a historical solution for the origin/domestication of dogs is overselled/overestimated, making real important questions to be a side helping tool, when actually understand the mechanisms and variations of how we make interactions with other species in different circumstances should be the real question. But yeah we live in the sensational world.
    4) Domestication can be reached by several ways, but colonization of species can be one ;) as a natural behavior of northern human cultures.
    5) I dont know which are the phenomenological questions you pursuit, though…?


    • on October 27, 2017 at 8:35 am retrieverman

      I’ve done No 3. hours and hours on this blog lol.


  6. on October 27, 2017 at 6:48 am Elke Baumgarte

    I saw a documentary some time ago that may shine some light on the same problem. It was about a colony of baboons that kept ethiopian wolves as members of the family. I am not quite sure which sort of baboon, but it might have been Gelada’s, the grass eating kind. They snatched wolf pups, when they were still very small and raised them like their own. the pups eventually behaved like baboons, were accepted as equal members of the group and with their superior hearing and smell capacities were able to alarm the group much earlier about predators than usual, thus keeping the group safe. Maybe there was a similar relationship between early humans and wolves.


  7. on November 14, 2017 at 12:01 am David Lampert

    In a book you cite in another post, “Newfoundland and its untrodden ways”, By John Guille Millais. Millais recounts a storiy he hears from 1622 about wolves coming down to the shore and eating the fishermans scraps, even playing with their dogs!

    I just discovered your blog and I love it!



Comments are closed.

  • Like on Facebook

    The Retriever, Dog, and Wildlife Blog

    Promote Your Page Too
  • Blog Stats

    • 9,552,353 hits
  • Retrieverman’s Twitter

    • RT @dhruvfranklin: I think it's often hard to comprehend the scale of biodiversity loss in North America without proper visuals. Left: A wo… 3 hours ago
    • one person followed me // automatically checked by fllwrs.com 4 hours ago
    • retrievermanii.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-la… https://t.co/su6REHh0jV 2 days ago
    • @Fiorella_im Seder = Democrats' George Costanza. The Jerk Store called. They don't want him returned. 3 days ago
    • one person unfollowed me // automatically checked by fllwrs.com 3 days ago
  • Google rank

    Check Google Page Rank
  • Archives

    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
    • October 2014
    • September 2014
    • August 2014
    • July 2014
    • June 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • March 2014
    • February 2014
    • January 2014
    • December 2013
    • November 2013
    • October 2013
    • September 2013
    • August 2013
    • July 2013
    • June 2013
    • May 2013
    • April 2013
    • March 2013
    • February 2013
    • January 2013
    • December 2012
    • November 2012
    • October 2012
    • September 2012
    • August 2012
    • July 2012
    • June 2012
    • May 2012
    • April 2012
    • March 2012
    • February 2012
    • January 2012
    • December 2011
    • November 2011
    • October 2011
    • September 2011
    • August 2011
    • July 2011
    • June 2011
    • May 2011
    • April 2011
    • March 2011
    • February 2011
    • January 2011
    • December 2010
    • November 2010
    • October 2010
    • September 2010
    • August 2010
    • July 2010
    • June 2010
    • May 2010
    • April 2010
    • March 2010
    • February 2010
    • January 2010
    • December 2009
    • November 2009
    • October 2009
    • September 2009
    • August 2009
    • July 2009
    • June 2009
    • May 2009
    • April 2009
    • March 2009
    • February 2009
    • January 2009
    • December 2008
    • November 2008
    • October 2008
    • September 2008
    • August 2008
    • July 2008
  • Recent Comments

    markgelbart on Retiring this Space
    oneforestfragment on Retiring this Space
    The Evolving Natural… on So does the maned wolf break t…
    SWestfall3 on So does the maned wolf break t…
    Ole Possum on So does the maned wolf break t…
  • Meta

    • Register
    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.com
  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,701 other followers

  • Pages

    • About
    • Contact
    • Patreon
    • Premium Membership
    • Services
  • Subscribe to Retrieverman's Weblog by Email
  • Revolver map

    Map

  • Top Posts

    • Coyote tracks in the snow
  • SiteCounter

    wordpress analytics
    View My Stats
  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,701 other followers

  • Donate to this blog

  • Top 50 Northwest Dog Blogs

    top 50 dog blogs

Blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
%d bloggers like this: