5 ms·

It's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs. A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has hu

by sph 10mo ago

It's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs. A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has human society in any way been affected by the structure of wolf packs? Did hairless monkeys form stronger tribes because of it? I don't believe for a second that this deep interspecies friendship has been one-sided and hasn't brought psychological if not physical changes as much as the changes it's brought to wolves.

tomkaos 10mo ago
I read somewhere that he could have change human sleep. Human can have a deeper sleep knowing a guard will alert of danger.
- the_af 10mo ago
  Thankfully we have those other animals, "human puppies", to counteract this :P
  - wincy 10mo ago
    I know it’s said in jest, but if your kid is attached while you’re sleeping, i.e. breastfeeding and cosleeping, which a hunter gatherer society would most certainly do, babies don’t fuss unless they’re sick or something. My wife slept soundly through the night and said “it’s amazing she doesn’t feed at night!” (Referring to our daughter), and I said, shocked, “she eats at night, she makes a soft noise and you just roll over and pop a boob in her mouth without waking up!” This is entirely a modern problem of our own creation and convenience.
mikkupikku 10mo ago
Seems plausible to me that our long relationship with wolves/dogs has modified humanity to be more empathic to other species of animals in general. Probably impossible to prove though.
wendgeabos 10mo ago
It's hard to imagine how it could not have driven human evolution as well.
HPsquared 10mo ago
This is where evolutionary theory can be viewed through the lens of coevolution or group selection (a group defined as containing both a selection of humans, and also animals and plants in varying degrees of domestication, as a whole system). This is in contrast to kin selection, which only accounts for genetic relatedness. I remember in one of Jiang Xueqin's videos, he made the interesting argument that "grain domesticated humans" at least as much, if not more, than "humans domesticated grain".
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  Grains aren't very good food until bread is invented (probably from sprouted grains, originally). Seeds are designed to keep their goodness inside, and are very good at that containment. Bread in turn requires cooking. (I wonder now if there was a brief period of surviving on raw sprouted grains... which are far inferior because they mold so quickly.) Wisdom teeth are far more valuable to a precooking human, who has to chew constantly to break down plant cells. The extra chewing causes stress that induces the jaw to grow longers, allowing space for the wisdome teeth. We're basically at the "awkward teenage" part of evolving past raw-food diets.
  - mjanx123 10mo ago
    Grass and other seeds were always stew ingredients https://phys.org/news/2022-11-real-paleo-diet-archaeological-evidence.html https://phys.org/news/2022-11-real-paleo-diet-archaeological...
- dkarl 10mo ago
  I think the "wheat domesticated humans" argument is about changes to our behavior, our culture and social structures, rather than genetic change. It isn't domestication in the evolutionary sense. It would be like keeping zebras on a farm with horses and doing your best to tame and train them. You might be able to change their behavior so that they behaved differently from wild zebras, but it wouldn't be domestication unless you bred them over generations to produce a population that was genetically different from wild zebras.
conductr 10mo ago
On a long enough timeline it’s possible that cat-people and dog-people evolve separately into different species
- thebruce87m 10mo ago
  I think some dog people already are a different species - hanging bags of dog shit on trees would never occur to me for example. I’d hate to see what their Christmas trees look like.
  - pxc 10mo ago
    Huh? Who does that?
    - sjw987 10mo ago
      In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. When confronted about leaving the bagged dog shit somewhere they always say they're going to pick it up on the way back, yet the next day it's still there. Modern British dog owners are incredibly irresponsible surrounding how they look after their pets and how they handle the pets mess. Covid made it measurably worse.
      - FeteCommuniste 10mo ago
        > In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. That's wild. I've never once seen this in the US. Obviously there are people who just don't clean up after their dogs in the first place, but to clean it up and then hang the bagged crap on a tree? Haha.
        jamiecurle 10mo ago
        They do it a lot. My garden backs onto a public woodland and I can confirm it happens. Last summer when I tidied up out the back of my house, I found at least five years worth of buried dog turds in bags. Cleaning it up was not fun. I used a backpack blower to blow it all into line of "turd shame" away from the houses. It looks a lot nicer out there now and I gave the trees a little prune (I'm a qualified arborist) so people know this is a "tidy area" and so far no more turds in bags.
dsign 10mo ago
Slightly tangential, but I think that dogs have allowed for some bad things to happen to us. Like, they are available physically, so if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person (your one and only partner), you can get a dog or five, or simply pet your friend’s dog or even a neighbor’s. Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.
- sph 10mo ago
  Are nuclear families a post-agricultural phenomenon? AFAIK, it's a much recent societal change driven by the industrial revolution (i.e. 300 years ago vs ~15,000 years of agriculture)
- TacticalCoder 10mo ago
  > ... if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person ... There are animals where the male and female only ever live together and are loyal (and not for the sake of the idea of loyalty, they're animals). It's not something speficic to some human societies.
- akkad33 10mo ago
  I don't really understand this comment. Are you saying dogs made way for nuclear families? Why would it be impossible? In India for example pet ownership is very low. Much lower than prevalence of nuclear families
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  > Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet. That's silly. US Midwest farmers meet every detail up until "would have been impossible"; dogs are common but not ubiquitous, and farming communities are highly social. (Cats, ironically, are ubiquitous on farms, because of their utility at hunting mice and rats.) Ironically, you're describing the classic "cat lady" trope, only with the wrong pet type.
deadbabe 10mo ago
Misconceptions about wolf pack hierarchical structures have led humans to come up with misguided perceptions of being an Alpha, Beta, Sigma, etc…
- psunavy03 10mo ago
  On the plus side, it makes it easier to write off someone as a loser when they use any of those terms unironically.
venusenvy47 10mo ago
I've watched a couple documentaries that discuss your question. I think they mention the aspect about how humans could become more agricultural. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10462930 https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10462930 https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dogs-that-changed-the-world-introduction/1273 https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dogs-that-changed-the-world-...
belviewreview 10mo ago
I am speculating that agriculture lead to human beings evolving to do the sort of labor that it requires, especially grains.
WalterBright 10mo ago
> how have wolves shaped humans? The bonds between humans and wolves go both ways. Humans love their dogs.

by sph 10mo ago

tomkaos 10mo ago

I read somewhere that he could have change human sleep. Human can have a deeper sleep knowing a guard will alert of danger.

the_af 10mo ago
Thankfully we have those other animals, "human puppies", to counteract this :P
- wincy 10mo ago
  I know it’s said in jest, but if your kid is attached while you’re sleeping, i.e. breastfeeding and cosleeping, which a hunter gatherer society would most certainly do, babies don’t fuss unless they’re sick or something. My wife slept soundly through the night and said “it’s amazing she doesn’t feed at night!” (Referring to our daughter), and I said, shocked, “she eats at night, she makes a soft noise and you just roll over and pop a boob in her mouth without waking up!” This is entirely a modern problem of our own creation and convenience.

mikkupikku 10mo ago

Seems plausible to me that our long relationship with wolves/dogs has modified humanity to be more empathic to other species of animals in general. Probably impossible to prove though.

wendgeabos 10mo ago

It's hard to imagine how it could not have driven human evolution as well.

HPsquared 10mo ago

This is where evolutionary theory can be viewed through the lens of coevolution or group selection (a group defined as containing both a selection of humans, and also animals and plants in varying degrees of domestication, as a whole system). This is in contrast to kin selection, which only accounts for genetic relatedness. I remember in one of Jiang Xueqin's videos, he made the interesting argument that "grain domesticated humans" at least as much, if not more, than "humans domesticated grain".

IAmBroom 10mo ago
Grains aren't very good food until bread is invented (probably from sprouted grains, originally). Seeds are designed to keep their goodness inside, and are very good at that containment. Bread in turn requires cooking. (I wonder now if there was a brief period of surviving on raw sprouted grains... which are far inferior because they mold so quickly.) Wisdom teeth are far more valuable to a precooking human, who has to chew constantly to break down plant cells. The extra chewing causes stress that induces the jaw to grow longers, allowing space for the wisdome teeth. We're basically at the "awkward teenage" part of evolving past raw-food diets.
- mjanx123 10mo ago
  Grass and other seeds were always stew ingredients https://phys.org/news/2022-11-real-paleo-diet-archaeological-evidence.html https://phys.org/news/2022-11-real-paleo-diet-archaeological...
dkarl 10mo ago
I think the "wheat domesticated humans" argument is about changes to our behavior, our culture and social structures, rather than genetic change. It isn't domestication in the evolutionary sense. It would be like keeping zebras on a farm with horses and doing your best to tame and train them. You might be able to change their behavior so that they behaved differently from wild zebras, but it wouldn't be domestication unless you bred them over generations to produce a population that was genetically different from wild zebras.

conductr 10mo ago

On a long enough timeline it’s possible that cat-people and dog-people evolve separately into different species

thebruce87m 10mo ago
I think some dog people already are a different species - hanging bags of dog shit on trees would never occur to me for example. I’d hate to see what their Christmas trees look like.
- pxc 10mo ago
  Huh? Who does that?
  - sjw987 10mo ago
    In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. When confronted about leaving the bagged dog shit somewhere they always say they're going to pick it up on the way back, yet the next day it's still there. Modern British dog owners are incredibly irresponsible surrounding how they look after their pets and how they handle the pets mess. Covid made it measurably worse.
    - FeteCommuniste 10mo ago
      > In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. That's wild. I've never once seen this in the US. Obviously there are people who just don't clean up after their dogs in the first place, but to clean it up and then hang the bagged crap on a tree? Haha.
      - jamiecurle 10mo ago
        They do it a lot. My garden backs onto a public woodland and I can confirm it happens. Last summer when I tidied up out the back of my house, I found at least five years worth of buried dog turds in bags. Cleaning it up was not fun. I used a backpack blower to blow it all into line of "turd shame" away from the houses. It looks a lot nicer out there now and I gave the trees a little prune (I'm a qualified arborist) so people know this is a "tidy area" and so far no more turds in bags.

dsign 10mo ago

Slightly tangential, but I think that dogs have allowed for some bad things to happen to us. Like, they are available physically, so if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person (your one and only partner), you can get a dog or five, or simply pet your friend’s dog or even a neighbor’s. Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.

sph 10mo ago
Are nuclear families a post-agricultural phenomenon? AFAIK, it's a much recent societal change driven by the industrial revolution (i.e. 300 years ago vs ~15,000 years of agriculture)
TacticalCoder 10mo ago
> ... if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person ... There are animals where the male and female only ever live together and are loyal (and not for the sake of the idea of loyalty, they're animals). It's not something speficic to some human societies.
akkad33 10mo ago
I don't really understand this comment. Are you saying dogs made way for nuclear families? Why would it be impossible? In India for example pet ownership is very low. Much lower than prevalence of nuclear families
IAmBroom 10mo ago
> Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet. That's silly. US Midwest farmers meet every detail up until "would have been impossible"; dogs are common but not ubiquitous, and farming communities are highly social. (Cats, ironically, are ubiquitous on farms, because of their utility at hunting mice and rats.) Ironically, you're describing the classic "cat lady" trope, only with the wrong pet type.

deadbabe 10mo ago

Misconceptions about wolf pack hierarchical structures have led humans to come up with misguided perceptions of being an Alpha, Beta, Sigma, etc…

psunavy03 10mo ago
On the plus side, it makes it easier to write off someone as a loser when they use any of those terms unironically.

venusenvy47 10mo ago

I've watched a couple documentaries that discuss your question. I think they mention the aspect about how humans could become more agricultural. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10462930 https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10462930 https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dogs-that-changed-the-world-introduction/1273 https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dogs-that-changed-the-world-...

belviewreview 10mo ago

I am speculating that agriculture lead to human beings evolving to do the sort of labor that it requires, especially grains.

WalterBright 10mo ago

> how have wolves shaped humans? The bonds between humans and wolves go both ways. Humans love their dogs.