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New light on the domestication of the dog (1 Viewer)

Looks pretty simple to me. You cannot say, when you have evidence of the existence of dogs 33,000 years ago, that dogs were first domesticated 11,000 years ago, so starch-related changes post-date domestication by 22,000 years.

Equally, once you have established that starch-related changes post-date domestication and for that matter so does the human adoption of agriculture, you need another excuse for domestication.

Skulking round rubbish tips, a practice adopted by not only wolves but jackals, foxes, rats, mice, gulls, crows, etc, etc, is NOT domestication and given the list I've just recounted, does not lead to it, either.

While the route to domestication could be either commensal co-operation or pupnapping and training (or both) and we may never know which, the reasons for domestication must be advantage to humans and to find those you look at the areas where wolves (dogs) score over humans: hearing, smelling, running, biting.

This gives you a range of jobs for the new addition to the human armoury: guard dog,tracker dog, hunting dog, sled puller( last resort meal). Only one or just perhaps two of these are an advantage to a sedentary agricultural population whereas hunter-gatherers or nomadic pastoralists can utilise all of them.

Of course nomads are less likely to leave identifiable fossils in places where they are likely to be found, so the early dogs - which in any case are likely to be difficult to separate from wolves on e.g. skull morphology (if you don't believe me, read some mid-twentieth century literature on wolf sub-specific classification) - are less likely to register in the areas where they are more likely to have originated. So finding earliest dogs in areas with sedentary human populations becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

John
 
then 700 years after the end of last glacial period (Pleictocene's Würm), at the beginning of current postglacial times (Holocene) we live in.
Video:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21180230#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

Mmm. You have taken my words well out of context there. The thrust of my argument is that the evidence is for much earlier domestication and the reasoning put down by the agriculturalists is a dreadful case of hammering the facts to fit the theory.

John
 
I did not understand. But this
http://www.nature.com/news/dog-s-dinner-was-key-to-domestication-1.12280
fossils place the earliest dogs anywhere from 33,000 years ago in Siberia to 11,000 years ago in Israel, whereas DNA studies of modern dogs put domestication at least 10,000 years ago, and in either Southeast Asia or the Middle East
is about DNA of genes responsible for digestion of starches ?

Very interesting. Dogs were always known to have different behavioral features than wolves. But they found out, that dogs are better accomodated to digest and metabolise starches in comparison to wolf.
reasoning put down by the agriculturalists is a dreadful case of hammering the facts to fit the theory.
Maybe dogs were evolving along with people. Early dogs and early H. sapiens ate more meat, later people and their dogs developed better starches metabolism. Those authors compared also genes important in brain function but don't write in abstract how deeply they changed in comparison to genes responsible for starches metabolis.
Perhaps such comparison is not so easy, because slight changes in genes of sofisticated nervous system can cause dramatic changes in behavior. Digestion is much simpler than thinking.
 
I did not understand. But thisis about DNA of genes responsible for digestion of starches ?

Very interesting. Dogs were always known to have different behavioral features than wolves. But they found out, that dogs are better accomodated to digest and metabolise starches in comparison to wolf.Maybe dogs were evolving along with people. Early dogs and early H. sapiens ate more meat, later people and their dogs developed better starches metabolism. Those authors compared also genes important in brain function but don't write in abstract how deeply they changed in comparison to genes responsible for starches metabolis.
Perhaps such comparison is not so easy, because slight changes in genes of sofisticated nervous system can cause dramatic changes in behavior. Digestion is much simpler than thinking.

Yep. Kind of true.

However.... its common ground that dogs evolved/were created by selective breeding for preferred characters, from wolves. Ergo, the further back you go into dog evolution, the harder it becomes to identify a dog from a wolf using available evidence: because eventually you must get to the point at which the domesticated animal is in fact a wolf.

Dave Mech is quite specific even in early editions of his classic The Wolf - Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species, in identifying the window for socialising wolves to humans and of course its the usual story of get 'em young, in order to do any socialising or training at all.

We now know to very fine limits how much change you can put into a species/breed in just a few generations through deliberate selective breeding. Maximising change of course means breeding within a pool of suitable animals, not constantly removing new animals from the wild (unlike traditional falconry which relies on new wild-caught stock, or used to anyway - but they only require imprinting and food dependence on man as changes from wild behaviour.) So job number one once you have characters you want embedded in the proto-dog is to keep your breeding stock isolated from wild wolves - and already the wild wolf has become your rival/enemy, to be excluded from intimate contact with your wolves/dogs.

Early man probably didn't learn this all very quickly (I'm assuming we are way back in hunter gatherer times, not nomadic pastoralist) and no doubt he also experimented with back-crossing to breed wilder stamina etc back into his bloodlines (ferreters still do this of course, and allegedly the Native Americans and Inuit still do with their dogs as well, although I suspect its not so easy now with wolves a lot more suspicous of man). Dog evolution therefore probably started slow and you can bet that whatever date fossils show identifiable dogs, the actual "man meets dog" moment beloved of Konrad Lorenz was a hell of a lot earlier.

The thing you do have to assume is that he was doing it for his benefit and that means he had purposes for his association with dogs: and as I said before, those you will find in hunting not in agriculture.

John
 
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http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/45636
Mystery of Dog Evolution Solved
ENN: Top Stories
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/13/molbev.mst027.abstract
Benjamin N. Sacks, Sarah K. Brown, Danielle Stephens, Niels C. Pedersen, Jui-Te Wu, and Oliver Berry
Y chromosome analysis of dingoes and Southeast Asian village dogs suggests a Neolithic continental expansion from Southeast Asia followed by multiple Austronesian dispersals
Mol Biol Evol mst027 first published online February 13, 2013 doi:10.1093/molbev/mst027
They write that dogs were originated in Europe and the Middle East >14,000 BP, later moved to south-east Asia with farmers and their evolution accelerated there thanks to isolation from wolves, and after that they came back to north-west replacing more primitive dogs. Dingoes could arrived in Australia directly from Taiwan.
 
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