New Study Backs Theory That Wolves Traded the Wild for Table Scraps—and Became Dogs

It’s hard to imagine that dogs descended from fierce grey wolves—especially when your fat labrador begs for peanut butter, or your poodle snores on the couch. And yet, that’s exactly what happened. The ancestors of grey wolves were domesticated into dogs in two distinct periods: around 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, and 15,000 years ago to the modern era. While the more recent period likely saw humans selectively breeding for tamer wolves, the domestication process of the older period has been hotly debated. Researchers in the U.S. have uncovered new evidence bolstering a classic hypothesis—that wolves domesticated themselves to access food from prehistoric human settlements. A common pushback against this hypothesis is that natural selection without human intervention couldn’t have occurred so quickly, but the researchers used mathematical models to demonstrate that, actually, it’s paw-sible. Their research is detailed in a study published February 12 in Proceedings of the Royal Societ ... Read full article.