Ideas - Entre Chien et Loup: How Dogs Began

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Scientists agree that dogs evolved from wolves and were the first domesticated animals. But exactly how that happened is hotly contested. IDEAS contributor Neil Sandell examines the theories and the evolution of the relationship between dogs and humans. *This episode originally aired on March 1, 2021.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Nala Ayed, and this is Ideas.

Sadie, you are a wolf. Even better. Not even from the lineage of wolves that we know of now, but of this kind of magical ancient wolf ancestor that is extinct now. ancestor that is extinct now. Dogs are the personification of an animal that is no longer alive and our only kind of link to that animal is these dogs that live with us. Like you, Sadie. The archaeologist Dr. Angela Perry, in conversation with Sadie, a dog. Well, not just any dog. The dog of ideas contributor, Neil Sandel. Well, Sadie looks like she gets out of bed every day and never looks in the mirror.

She is a bit like an unmade bed. Long, stretched body, short, stubby legs, long snout, messy hair, very rumpled, which is really part of her charm. Sadie is a wire-haired dachshund, nothing at all like a wolf. So how on earth did this unlikely creature, did any of our dogs for that matter, descend from wolves? How is it that dogs were the first domesticated animals? Neil Sandel begins his story with a curious expression he came upon

while learning French, entre chien et loup. He asks his friend Sébastien for a little help. for a little help. Entre chien et loup, so what does it mean? Entre chien et loup means this moment of the day where the evening is coming, but it's not quite still there. It's not clear whether you are in the evening time or in the daytime. And it describes also the light

which is in between in between daylight and evening it's the moment where you hesitate The words, if you would translate it literally, it would mean between dog and wolf. So where does it come from? I don't know. Of course, you immediately think that maybe the dog would represent the day. And the wolf being the night, being maybe wilder than the dog. Dogs are closer to wolves than they are to anything else. Dogs were the beginning of everything.

Dogs were the beginning of our understanding that a relationship with an animal can be more than wild. Entre Chins et Loups is this moment of the day where things are in between. I've been thinking a lot about that in-between time. I picture looking across a valley at twilight. There's a silhouette of an animal in the distance, so faint that I can't tell. Is it a dog or a wolf? In the twilight of prehistory, for a very long time, there were only wolves, and then dogs and wolves.

What happened in between? Scientists have been peering into the mists of time, trying to understand how it all began. What they know for sure is that dogs... Yes, like you, Sadie, dogs evolved from wolves. Another thing they agree on, that dogs were the first domesticated animal. How that happened is a kind of prehistoric whodunit. For the longest time. The accepted idea was that humans domesticated dogs.

We did it. That's Dr. Catherine Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts. We'll get to know her a little bit later. This story of domestication, that we did it, comes in two versions. One version says it started with wolves and humans hunting together. Angela Perry, an archaeologist at Durham University

in Great Britain. So the kind of hunting partnership hypothesis is that humans and wolves are both social creatures. We both exist in packs. We hunt together. We work together to bring down prey larger than ourselves. We're daylight hunters, and we have this kind of very similar social structure where we go back to the home camp, right? And we work together to raise our young and communal eating and things like that. So the social structure between wolves and humans, especially ancient hunter-gatherer populations in Eurasia, is very, very similar. And so that kind of similarity in social structure can really lead you to thinking, well, why would wolves and humans not work together? So the real issue with

this goes back to the idea of humans and wolves were in close proximity for tens of thousands of years without the process of domestication. So what would it have been that they would have woken up one day and said, okay, today's the day that we've decided we're going to try to work with wolves to, you know, take down prey together. And when I think about the process of being a hunter-gatherer group in ancient Eurasia, living with predators and dangerous predators all around you is a daily part, you know, of your life and a daily worry. Why you would consider creating some partnership with an animal you not only see as a dangerous predator but also competition for prey is really hard for me to understand as an archaeologist as a person who

you know works with wolves and dogs how that process would have started thinking about that it's not just a one-way partnership right you would also have to get a population of wolves to somehow understand that they are to cooperate with you. I don't know if you ever try to take a carcass or any kind of food away from a wolf once it has gotten its paws on it, but it's a very difficult process. So really thinking through the intricacies of how that would work leads me to believe that that's an unlikely process. So really thinking through the intricacies of how that would work leads me to believe that that's an unlikely process. If that's unlikely, there is a second hypothesis of domestication, the same answer to whodunit, but by a different method. We believe that humans, modern humans, initiated this domestication. I'm Michele Hermonpre. I work at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. I'm a paleontologist and an archaeozoologist. I study fossil mammals that lived here during the Ice Age, here in Belgium and in Northern Europe. And I also look at the interaction between human populations from the Ice Age and the mammals that were living during that time.

Dr. Hermann Prey has co-authored about 100 papers on these subjects. If we look at ethnographic data, we see that hunter-gatherers, because agriculture did not exist yet, probably there was a special vision of modern humans towards the animal world. And we see that also in the cave paintings where animals, mammals especially, are pictured. especially are pictured. So they were very interested in knowing these animals and they were also interested in using these animals. I think the easiest thing for them to consider, to know animals, is to bring them home, to kidnap pups, to bring them home and to raise them. them home and to raise them and sometimes these pups could reproduce between themselves and so there was a new generation of pups and people probably made a selection on those pups that were the most gentle or the most had a most positive reaction towards humans. And so step by step, there was a selection on behavior.

And step by step, every new generation, more docile, more friendly pups could be selected. So after a number of generations, the first dogs emerged. And why would they take wolf pups to begin with? What would be the reason? Well, there are probably several reasons. So one of the reasons could be for the fur. We see this in ethnographic data that, for instance, in Mongolia or in Alaska, people capture pups, capture them in spring when they are just only a few days old. So wolves and foxes, for instance, and they raise them until the winter. So when the fur is really well developed and thick, and then the animals are killed to obtain the fur.

So that could be one reason. We think that they could also do this for rituals. We have some evidence of skulls that are modified for instance brain cases that are perforated which indicate that these animals had a symbolic value. So this could be two important reasons to kidnap pups. Meet your hermon prey in Brussels. So, prehistoric humans kidnap wolf pups,

select the gentle ones and breed them, generation after generation. Eventually, you get a tame animal that is a dog. Make sense? Well, not to this scientist. She's spent her fair share of time with wolves, especially during the first critical weeks of life. You have this huge problem, which is how do you get from a dog to a wolf on purpose with purposeful breeding. And the problem is that you have to go from a wild animal to a domestic animal. I'm Catherine Lord. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Carlson Lab at University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Broad Institute. And I'm an evolutionary biologist.

I study mainly dogs and wolves. You raised wolf puppies in your research. Yes. How many times did you do that? You know, I've done it enough that I've lost count and have to think really hard to remember exactly how many litters it was. I think I now have about 42 pups that I've raised or been involved in rearing, but it's enough that I've lost track. And about that kidnapping hypothesis? So you have to imagine here's this person who is hunting and gathering for their food. And like all other animals that do this as living on the edge of their ability to survive, right, they have to get more energy than they use. And they're going to go out and I believe that they could have acquired wolf puppies.

I believe that they could have acquired wolf puppies. They'd have to acquire them, though, before three weeks of age in order to socialize them. That's a little harder. But let's say they could do that. And they got a litter of wolves, so let's say four puppies. And then somebody had to feed them somehow. No bottles. People have suggested women breastfed them, which having raised wolf puppies is a horrific idea to me. Even breastfeeding dog pups sounds a bit painful, but wolves in particular have extremely sharp teeth.

And when they don't get enough milk, they start biting really hard. Even their moms are not okay with this. And so the fact that a woman might potentially damage herself when she needs to feed her own child, four wolf puppies at that who need to eat every four hours on top of her own kid having to eat. Even if you have a small group of people, that seems a little improbable. But let's say they do. So they raise them and they keep them around them all the time so that they're social. Now the wolf pup is a year old

and it's going to want to go out and look for a mate. But you want it to mate with a specific individual who is more friendly. And you have a population of four right now. So you don't have a big choice, but you somehow have to convince the wolf to mate with the wolf you want. This is not an easy thing to do. You have no fencing. You have no leashes that will hang. And you can't just put a wolf on a rope leash. It'll chew right out of it. So you need some kind of chain or something to keep them where you want.

Some people have suggested you could break their legs. Sounds horrible. Not very useful for hunting anymore at that point. But even if you manage to get them to breed with the animal you wanted to, now their pups are going to be just as wild as they were when they're born because the only thing you changed was the environment, not the animal, right? So you didn't change their genes when you socialized them. You only changed their environment during that critical period of socialization.

So they start off right where their parents would have been. And so it's going to take many, many generations, assuming that you can find the variation, it's going to take many, many generations to have any effect on this timing of critical period, which we think is so important to getting you a dog. And you need a lot of animals to go through. So now you have to multiply this process by hundreds and hundreds of animals. And it just sounds completely ridiculous to me. I don't see how it could possibly work when you have this extremely simple Occam's razor, right? You have this extremely simple environmental setup and they do it for themselves.

extremely simple environmental setup, and they do it for themselves. Self-domestication. Many of the scientists I spoke to believe this is the most likely answer to the whodunit. But how would that work? Well, this man had some ideas. I'm looking at behavior from an evolutionary point of view. I think that all those behaviors, those snarls and growls and everything else, are genetic. By the way, I don't think dogs are conscious. Raymond Coppinger, biologist, author, provocateur.

He liked to be controversial. He liked to make people think. I first met him in my freshman year at Hampshire College. And my very first semester, I took animal behavior with Ray. And in a school of, I think we had about 1,200 students at that point. That class sometimes had 100 kids in it because he was just such a fantastic lecturer. He was really good at teaching undergraduates how to think critically for themselves. I often refer to it as just he taught me how to think. He was also my mentor for many, many years. In the 1980s, Raymond Coppinger started thinking about dogs from an evolutionary perspective. Working with his wife and co-author Lorna, the Coppingers expanded on an earlier idea about dog domestication

by the German archaeologist Friedrich Zuner. It came to be known as the garbage dump hypothesis. That idea was that once humans started to settle, we produced a lot of garbage in one place. And that that new niche allowed for the evolution of species such as the dog to take advantage of it. And so domestication actually occurred when, or the process of domestication occurred when dogs evolved to survive in this new niche. So instead of hunting for survival, ancient wolves found they could do better by becoming less like wolves. They became scavengers. And not only did they become scavengers, but they became scavengers who needed to get close to humans because humans were creating the food source.

to get close to humans because humans were creating the food source. So the ability to not only get closer but to stay closer to humans when they brought out trash became a really key evolutionary development. So we still have wolves who will scavenge at dump sites, but they're out-competed by dogs because of this one trait, which is, we call it flight distance. So how close will you let something frightening approach before you start to run? And then very closely tied to that is how far away will you run once you start running? And so wolves classically have this very large flight distance. So a wolf eating at a garbage dump tends to only do it at night when

people aren't around. And when they sense a person approaching, usually because they smell them, they will start running and they'll stay away. They'll run far and they don't come back for a while because it was scary. A dog, on the other hand, even a dog who grows up in a garbage dump, not a pet dog, a dog who's living in the garbage dump, because they're so easy to socialize with people, when a person comes, they just sort of shift over. It's very much like the behavior you see in like a pigeon in the park. You can't catch the pigeon, you can't pat the pigeon, but you can get uncomfortably close to the pigeon before it starts to shift away from you and fly in their case. So they have a really

short in flight distance and that makes them really well adapted to survive in this niche because they're the first ones there. They aren't using up any energy running away from the people. They get the best food right away and they don't have to lose out when more food comes. When the food comes, they're right there ready for it. So we think that may have been the key to allowing them to adapt to this new niche. You might have noticed that Catherine Lord mentioned free-ranging dogs. These are dogs that just wander around human settlements. They're not pets. They're not abandoned. They're village dogs. And the Coppenters studied them all over the world. Researchers like Dr. Sarah Marshall-Piccini still do.

She's with the Wolf Science Center in Austria. Free-ranging dogs are the forgotten dog, if you want. But I think they are a really important part of it, not just because numerically they're much sort of more numerous than sort of Western pet dogs, but also because in a sense if we have any possibility of thinking about how dogs used to live

that's probably a closer model than our Western child-like way of treating dogs. So I think they are a hugely important sort of population that needs more attention. Rough estimate, four out of five dogs in the world are free-ranging. As Sarah Marshall-Piccini said, how they live their lives gives us clues as to how prehistoric dogs lived theirs.

Just a warning, this next part is kind of gross. If you look at village dogs today, one of the biggest sources of food that they actually utilize is human feces. So we are effectively generating dog food machines in a sense. And if you do the analysis of the kind of nutrients that are in human feces, you discover that they're actually very good. So of course, we don't know exactly what the diet was then compared to what it is now. It could be that now we have much richer food. But still, the sort of the feces, if you want, played, the human feces, I think, played probably a considerably big part in all of this story. This story, if we're, played, the human feces, I think, played probably a considerably big part in all of this story. This story, if we're talking evolution, is what changes when wolves go from

hunting to scavenging. And one of the most remarkable changes is how they raise their young. Once you get rid of that hunting behavior and you switch over to scavenging, you no longer need as much parental care. So wolves have to, they don't get really good at hunting till they're like two or three years old. It's like a professional sport. They aren't good at it until they're like two or three, and then they only have a few good years in them to really be the top hunter in their family. And then they rely on the younger animals after that. So it's really complicated to do well. And you have to be really good at it.

And part of it is learned. So they have to stick around mom and dad until they're good at it, which is usually about two years. And they might hang around longer. So that's really expensive and leads to wolves having to spread out their litters so they don't have more than one litter a year. Sometimes they have less. If it's a bad year, they just keep taking care of those babies. And those babies stick around mom and dad for two years. So that's a lot of parental care. Dogs have their pups and then they're done with them at about 10 weeks of age in a free-living population.

And at that point, they're old enough to walk off and eat a rotten melon on their own. They still have a lot of competition with the bigger dogs, but they can do it. And so you've suddenly, once you don't have to hunt anymore, you've suddenly allowed to have a much faster turnover in pups, right? Moms can, on average, in a free-living group, have pups every eight months or so. They don't have to worry about season because there's always garbage, and they don't have to worry about raising pups who can hunt. Now, when you hear about all of these changes that happened in the past, you might think, wait, are we talking about a wolf now or a dog? Well, what we're talking about is that in-between time, which gets us to some tricky questions,

like when did domestication happen? And what do we mean by domestication anyway? Angela Perry, Durham University. parts of their survival. For example, they're depending on humans to make the final kill of prey and then to feed them that kill or to provide shelter or protection or things like that. The key point to really think about when it comes to domestication is that is not, domestication is not an event. It's not a thing that happened at a set point in time and after that you have a dog. We really like to describe it as a process and it's a process that may have taken thousands of years to reach the point where both wolves and humans identified themselves as kind of co-domesticating. themselves as kind of co-domesticating.

That kind of process of moving from kind of a skittish, scared animal to a shy but interested animal, then to a excitable, happy-to-see-you animal is not an event that happens with the snap of the fingers, but a process over time. You're listening to Entre Chien et Loup, How Dogs Began. You can find Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA,

the news you've got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. This much scientists agree on, that dogs evolved from wolves, and that dogs were the first domesticated animal.

How that happened is the subject of a lot of disagreement. Many scientists think that self-domestication is the most plausible explanation. Some wolves found an advantage by hanging around the settlements of our prehistoric ancestors and eating their garbage. Over time, they evolved into the first dogs. But when that happened remains elusive. Here's IDEA's contributor, Neil Sandel. The evolution of the dog was a process that likely took thousands of years, and that makes it hard to pin down to a precise date.

But at least maybe we can get closer. The first line of evidence, the ancient bones unearthed by archaeologists. Angela Perry. For many, many decades now, we've been relying almost exclusively on the size and shape of bones to help us identify what's a dog, what's a wolf. And it is subject to interpretation. One of the main issues that we have with this is we don't have a really great understanding of what wolf populations in Eurasia during the Pleistocene, during the time period of dog domestication, looked like. So we had a number of lineages, a number of populations of wolves around 20,000 years ago that have gone extinct. We're almost positive that one of these extinct lineages of wolves somewhere in Eurasia was the wolf population that gave rise to domesticated dogs. So it's likely that that population that led to dogs no longer exists.

They're not directly related to the modern wolves that we see running around in North America or Eurasia now. Eurasia now. So that kind of bottleneck, that kind of dying off of a number of populations of wolves around 20,000 years ago, means that we had a lot more variation in wolves prior to 20,000 years ago than we do now. And we actually know very, very little about all of those wolf populations. So when you talk about how do we identify out of all these potentially very different varying Pleistocene wolf populations, how would we pick out a domesticated dog? How would we identify, you know, the first populations, the early populations of domesticated dogs from these wolf groups, what we need to kind of start with is really a better understanding of those wolves. So where we're at now is we find remains at archaeological sites that are fairly old,

somewhere around 40,000, 30,000 years ago. We have a number of specimens, a number of bones from sites dated in that time period that are suspicious. They look potentially interesting and like they could potentially be something, not wolf. But it's not quite clear what they are. They could very easily be a wolf that's just a little bit different, some kind of subpopulation that we haven't identified previously. You know, they have a little shorter legs or little smaller teeth, or their snout is a little bit shorter, their head is a little bit, you know, wider, or one of these kind of indicating factors to us that kind of triggers this idea that this might not be a wolf.

But we really don't have enough evidence just from the bones alone to tell us. We've kind of reached the point in dog domestication work where the bones are not enough. The science of genomics could bring us closer to an answer. It's a field of science that's advancing with breathtaking speed. Gregor Larson is a professor of evolutionary genomics at Oxford University, and he told me that when he was getting his PhD, sequencing ancient DNA would yield 80 base pairs, 80 points of data. That was 15 years ago. Today?

I just got off a meeting this morning, and we are talking about we've just generated from a single ancient dog, we've generated about 300 billion base pairs. So in 15 years, we've gone from 80 to 300 billion. A firehose of data. You would think that would get us closer to answering when domestication happened. But no. There is still critical evidence that's missing.

Gregor Larson's take is that the best science can do is set out a range of when it might have happened. At about 40,000 years ago, it's fair to say that there were no dogs, that we had a lot of different wolf populations, including many that are now extinct, all over Eurasia, but there were no dogs at 40,000. And then there's a site of Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, where has, for a long time, there's been a dog that's been claimed there. And recently there's a site of Bonn Oberkassel in Germany, where has for a long time, there's been a dog that's been claimed there. And recently there was a publication that looked at a whole bunch of different data. And I think for the vast majority of the field, that's a pretty decent dog. It had some diseases that were then taken care of. It was cared for by people. It was intentionally

interred. Morphologically, it looks more and more like a dog, a modern dog than it does a wolf. And so there's a whole series of lines of evidence that suggest that 15,000 years ago in Germany, you have a dog. All the data that we have now, and we're up to, I think, 32 ancient genomes and hundreds of thousands of modern genomes, all the data right now is consistent with a single wolf population leading to all the variability that we see in modern dogs. So again, that population is now extinct. And what we'd really love to do is find some members of that wolf population, find the wolf that is actually closer to modern dogs. Because at the moment, when we look at all ancient wolves and all modern wolves, none of them, not a single population is any closer to all the modern dogs

than any other wolf population. As yet, despite lots of effort and lots of bones and lots of sequencing, we haven't found that smoking gun. We don't have the earliest dogs. We don't have the earliest wolves that led to dogs. So everything that we're doing is in this empty space. In between. I think what's really interesting about it is partly this amazing shift that we've gotten between the dog and the wolf behaviorally and that it happened with very little genetic change. So there's a really complex interaction that gets us from gene to behavior. How does that evolution of that small change in genes interact with early development and environmental change to get us this really very different animal? It's quite warm for them, so they are hiding.

But we have to find them because they are hiding in the bushes. It's very green at the moment and it's warm. And it's midday, so they are taking their midday break. My name is Friederike Range and I'm a professor researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. Now I see a wolf. We have one over here. At the moment we are at the Wolf Science Center in Lower Austria. Nanook! Nanooko! Hallo! we are at the Wolf Science Center in Lower Austria. Nanook!

Nanooko! Hello! Nanook! And Una is also coming. So these are tundra wolves. These two really like each other. Nanook and Una are members of a pack of nine wolves. There's also a pack of dogs here. They live separately. Both packs roam around a forested enclosure of about two acres. Federica Ranga

co-founded the Wolf Science Center in 2008. Her goal, to study the behavioral differences between wolves and dogs side by side. I'm here to learn about the research, but there's another reason. Give me a moment. This is the first time I've seen wolves. What? Really, this is the first time I've seen wolves. Let's go to the other wolves because they are much more impressive. Okay. I'm already impressed. Moments later, I'm standing two meters away from a large white wolf.

Let's see if she quits. Nanook. Nanook Nanook Nanook come here hello hello I hand raised Nanook I didn't hand raise was hand-raising my son at that time. But Nanook knows me quite well. Hand-raising the wolves and dogs allows the researchers to study them up close, to understand what makes the two species different. The wolves are more self-secure in a way. They know what they want. are more self-secure in a way.

They know what they want. Whereas the dogs are more, they need the human more in the sense that they are more comfortable if the human is around. I think they are more dependent on the human. The researchers here are interested in how the wolves and dogs cooperate with other members of their pack. So they've set up experiments. For example, will they work together to pull a rope to get a reward?

Their findings? Wolves cooperate with each other really well. The dogs, not so much. The reason for that is not that the dogs are cognitively not as advanced. So it's not that they don't understand what the whole thing is about because if you give them a human as a partner they for example have no problem to solve the cooperative task so it's not about cognition it's really more about this tolerance accepting each other seeing each other as a cooperative partner and having said that I don't really see that

dogs see the humans as a cooperative partner in the sense that okay you tell me what to do and I'll do it so if I think about my children for example if I tell my son please can you set the table and he does it I very often say oh are you really cooperative today right whereas what he did is basically he followed my command if i put it like that and i think that's also characterizes in a very in very many aspects the dark human relationship wolves on the other hand they very often ask the human to come and follow them, whereas the dog usually waits for the human to say, okay, follow me, let's do it together. These differences between dogs and wolves, if it's not what you expected, you're not alone.

Sarah Marshall Pacini started at the Wolf Science Centre eight years ago. Looking back, it's been eye-opening. Well, I guess there are some things that have surprised me, or that when I imagined wolves and dogs before studying them, I wouldn't have suspected. There is this kind of idea that from wolves to dogs, dogs are kind of a nicer version than wolves, more less aggressive, more tolerant, kind of more fuzzy, cuddly kind of animal. And I don't actually think that's true. So if you then look at and compare them, what you find is that wolves are outstandingly cooperative, pretty tolerant with each other when it comes to sort of sharing

food, which makes sense if you think that they have to hunt together and then share carcasses. Whereas dogs can actually be quite possessive. And there is this pretty strict sort of hierarchy that dictates who has access to food. So this more tolerant version of dogs and sort of big, bad wolf thing really just falls apart and I think it's interesting it falls apart because it's I mean even in my head that stereotype of the big bad wolf and the nice fuzzy dog still was there even sort of coming and working here and that's radically changed I think the levels of cooperation that dogs seem to reach are, for the moment, I really haven't seen it in dogs.

I haven't given up. We're still designing new tests to try and see if in different contexts they cooperate as well as wolves. I think for the wolves it's really important to keep the pack cohesion, right? So they are more or less dependent on the cooperation that it works. So I cannot just bite somebody else because that animal might then leave. So I have to be careful about what I do. I have to think about my consequences to a certain degree.

Whereas in the dogs, it doesn't matter. So, I mean, they don't need each other to survive. They don't need each other to survive. They don't need each other to survive because they depend on humans. For wolves, though, pack cohesion is critical, and that means keeping their aggression in check with each other and, it seems, with the humans who raise them. They escalate slowly, so they will first try to get out of the situation, then they will growl,

then they might snap into the air, just and then I had one wolf at one point when I didn't listen to all these signals. He was just really holding my arm with his jaw. He didn't bite.

I didn't have any mark on my arm afterwards he just hold holds it um but it was a clear warning okay it's enough now stop it it's enough so they escalate very very slowly and this is also it's not just towards humans, it's also within packs. So they have a really nice escalation thing. And if you pay attention to the behavior of the animals, you see it very clearly. Dogs are very often much more reactive. They don't communicate, they don't communicate in these small steps. But very often they just escalate, which then becomes dangerous. very often they just escalate, which then becomes dangerous.

It seemed that one of the earliest elements that changed in a dog in comparison to a wolf is the ability to bark. And it seems that humans are very sensitive to barks. So I'm Giulia Cimarelli. I am a postdoc researcher at the Domestication Lab of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna in Austria. Many different canid species can bark, but dogs are the only species that seems to bark so much and have so many different types of barks. So it is possible that one of the reasons is that this was something that brought some advantages to them when living alongside humans. Humans seem to be, even nowadays, extremely sensitive to barks. They are as sensitive as when they hear children's crying. So it seems that it's really triggering in us attention and the willingness to stop the bark or to do something about it. Basically, it is possible that there was a sort of parallel evolution of the fact that this kind of focalization in dogs were most perceived by humans. So they were then selecting, even

indirectly, dogs that would bark in comparison to dogs who wouldn't bark because this was bringing an advantage to them. At some point, our ancestors figure something out, that these dogs just hanging around the camp could be useful for something. And when that happens, it's the dawning of something profound. Very quickly we learn that a dog can do things for us that make our lives easier. They are the kind of gateway to animals as biotechnology, to the understanding that a cow not only serves as a delicious hamburger, but also can pull your plow for you and, you know, provide milk and provide

bones and horns for raw material resources. So this idea that like an animal is not just an animal, but it can do stuff for you is something that started with dogs and that we figured out early on with dogs and we kind of mutated to every other animal that we went on to domesticate. And this gets at this underlying notion that you can somehow chart the evolution of humans by their use of tools. Exactly. And I think we focus a lot on physical tools that humans create, you know, bone tools and stone tools and things that we can see and touch and kind of manipulate. The idea of the creation of living tools, of living kind of biotechnology in the animals that we've domesticated and our co-evolution with those animals to use them.

I mean, we are still doing it now. Think about, you know, at Durham here, we're training dogs to smell COVID, right? And when you go to the airport, you have dogs that are sniffing out whether you brought back, you know, oranges with you from whatever place you were at. Or dogs are sniffing out cancer. So we're still doing it. We still use dogs as really important technology. And that started with hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic. So it's just kind of amazing the evolution of our kind of technology and understanding of using animals that begin in the Paleolithic is still going on now. What we're talking about here is the value that we humans put on dogs, yes?

Yeah, yeah, of course. And there's an arc to that. It's not like they get more and more and more valuable. No, no. Tell me about that. It's not like they get more and more and more valuable. No, no. Tell me about that. So I think it's a sad story for dogs once agriculture comes along. You know, once people figure out we could settle here in this valley, we could just start growing some, you know, wheat or corn. And, you know, all this moving around, it's kind of a bummer. Um, why don't we just stay in one place, grow some crops, get ourselves some livestock and just, um, build a village from here. Once the idea of food production kind of moves away from, um, wild hunting, um, the value of

dogs seems to kind of plummet at that point. So you get dogs moving from being kind of an important part of a tribe or group and almost being personified as another member of the group, like a human member of the group. see burials of dogs associated with hunter-gatherer groups where they're very elaborate burials. They're very clearly cared for and put in these prepared pits and they've got grave goods and all kinds of things. So there's clearly an association in hunter-gatherer period that dogs in places where they're being used for hunting are important and treated very much like humans. Once agriculture comes in, you start to see a bit of a shift. And I think when you're no longer depending on hunting for your primary source of food, then an animal who is important for that also goes by the wayside. So dogs move from this important person-like position to kind of pests and pariahs and they're kind of annoying underfoot

and always begging for food and barking and biting your children and being generally a little bit annoying. Maybe you could have been okay with some of that when they were going out and hunting and bringing home food, but now they're not and they're just being a little bit annoying. So you start seeing dogs being sacrificed, dogs being eaten, dogs being thrown in trash pits and all over the place. Just kind of the kind of treatment of dogs over time kind of diminishes. You see them being used more often in ritual for sacrifice and things like that. used more often in ritual for sacrifice and things like that. So this kind of idea that a dog is really important because it's doing something really important for you kind of goes by the wayside. So of course, you see different treatments all over the world. So in places like the Arctic, for example, where dogs are still being used for sledding, you see a bit of a different treatment

of dogs. But in places like Eurasia, North America, where you get agriculture coming in, dogs do plummet in their importance. But all is not lost for dogs, because they weren't just useful as hunters or sentries or bed warmers on a cold night. We have some evidence of this kind of pet-like treatment of dogs. important rich men or wealthy women who loved having their favorite little dog with them when they were, you know, outposted to wherever their soldier husband was put or things like that. But it was definitely when the Victorians came along. The Victorians had a great love of breeding and creating breeds and when you watch for example the AKC competitions or international kennel

competitions of toy breeds and the hunting breeds and the sporting breeds and things like that this kind of idea of creating very specific lineages and breeding of dog is something that really came along not long ago with the Victorians and And I think we're to the point now in Western culture where a dog does very little for the average dog owner aside from a deep, important emotional connection. And, you know, we shouldn't, we shouldn't poo-poo that. That's an incredible, it's an incredibly important thing, right? But we've gone very far from the creation of dogs as a sledding or hunting tool or sentry. Yet they fulfill this important emotional attachment that we have with them. And that's almost unlike an attachment that we have with any other animal.

That day we spoke, Angela Perry sat in a studio in England, and I was at home with Sadie at my feet. I had one last question, one that had been tugging at me since seeing those wolves in Austria. By accident or design, we humans had changed wolves into dogs. They'd gone from hunters to scavengers, from wild to dependent. We'd changed them in a dozen ways. How have dogs changed us? Wow, how have dogs changed us? I think that dogs were the beginning of everything.

Dogs were the beginning of our understanding that a relationship with an animal can be more than wild. That an animal can be part of the domestic sphere. That an animal is not just to be hunted or feared in the wild, but can be part of our everyday lives. Can I ask you to pause just a moment? Because my domestic animal is making a lot of noise right now. Okay. Rubbing her bum. Fine.

So I'll be right back. Of course, yeah. Pause for a sec. I'm back. Of course, yeah. Pause for a sec. I'm back. I'm just putting on my earbuds again. Yeah. Hang on. I mean, when you talk about why would you domesticate a dog,

I mean, look at their lives now. We feed them. We clean up their poo. We buy them really expensive toys and food. I mean, they've really figured it out like they won they won they really won You were listening to Entre Chien et Loup by IDS contributor Neil Sandel. Thank you to Sébastien Dissenaire and James Cantor in Brussels, the Wolf Science Centre in Austria,

and the SPARKS conference for their archived audio. Music by Solar Flare, Blue Dot Sessions, and Poddington Bear, all under Creative Commons license. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, for more on dog domestication, a reading list, and a link to the Wolf Science Centre. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad. Tell me about your first encounter with a wolf okay well i came and visited the wolf science

center at the time i was working at university of milan and federica and shofi said okay come on come and meet a wolf i was like oh okay then so we worked in walked into the enclosure and i met aragon who is a pretty large black wolf and And I remember one of the trainers, or maybe it was even Federica, I can't remember, asking Aragon to sit next to me. And his head sort of reached above my belly button whilst he was sitting. And I just looked at the size of his head and the size of his paw and I was just mind blown it was just one of those moments that you kind of go wow you are just awesome yeah so that was my first encounter I was pretty excited still I am actually and the other one is howling oh just so I slept in a little room above one of the

enclosures here at the World Science Centre. Federica said, where do you want to sleep? Do you want to sleep in a comfortable bed or an uncomfortable bed but where you get howling in the morning? Of course, howling in the morning. And I just woke up to the howling and I still actually get goosebumps now when I hear howling. So, yeah, it was pretty awesome.

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