4 ms·
> But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals. My pet theory is that humans captured wolf pups, possibly by dealing wi
by TrainedMonkey 11mo ago
> But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals.
My pet theory is that humans captured wolf pups, possibly by dealing with parents first, and kept them around as pets. People love playing with tiger, bear, and wolf pups and keeping them as pets today.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoThey may have but that's a way to get a (maybe) tame wolf, not a domesticated dog. It would take generations of breeding the tamest ones, with the behaviors you wanted, to get something like the beginnings of domesticated dogs.
- Arwill 11mo agoI read somewhere, that it might not have been a process, but a unique event. Dogs are not just gradually tamed wolves, but domestication might have been started with a genetic defect that made them tame.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoThat would create a genetic bottleneck of one, which should shine like a beacon in the DNA studies. We already know Homo sapiens had a bottleneck of thousands at one point. It also makes me wonder about the longlasting question of speciation. If it happens suddenly, shouldn't that indicate a singular (or near-singular) instance of mutation?
- DaveZale 11mo agodid you ever hear the story about the Russian researcher who bred foxes into domestic pets within only about a dozen and a half dozen rounds of keeping only the "cutest" pups? ". Within just 15 generations of selective breeding, the experiment had yielded foxes that could live with people."