A return to a theme previously presented in this place.

The primary motivation for today’s post was to continue the theme in my post last Wednesday: Canada – Ellesmere Island, that featured the most beautiful film from the BBC about the wolves on Ellesmere: Snow Wolf Family and Me.

Now it struck me that in writing a blog called Learning from Dogs there was a fair chance that the history of dogs had been featured before. I ran a quick search through previous posts using the search term ‘history of dogs’. There were a number of returns. Such as the republication of an article by Mark Derr: The Wolf Who Stayed last November. Then there was a post called Dogs and Wolves: Fascinating Research in February, 2014. Back in 2013, a post Dogs and Man: An eternity of a relationship.

Yet, all these and more didn’t quite offer what I am presenting today. (Well, that’s my story!)

First up was the chance finding of a blog called Bioventures. On the 11th September, 2013 there was a post published by D.K. Taylor under the title of: The Science of Dogs: Dogs Vs. Wolves.  Here’s how it started:

While watching The Science of Dogs, one portion of the documentary that interested me was the comparison of domestic dogs verses wolves. I knew beforehand that dogs and wolves behaved differently, but it was not until now that I knew much about these differences. Wolves depend upon their pack only, while dogs have been taught to rely on humans to meet many of their needs. The difference must be extreme for it to have been so obvious in the demonstration with the meat and rope from the documentary! (For anyone in the class that watched the other documentary: A piece of meat was tied to a rope, and a wolf kept pulling at it and trying to solve the problem for itself while the dog almost immediately looked to the nearby human for help.)

Then, and I forget how, I came upon a news blog, for want of a better description, called The Examiner. More precisely, I came across an article published on The Examiner back in January, 2013 called: How wolves became dogs explained in groundbreaking study.

A study by a team of American and Swedish researchers published on Jan. 23 in the Journal of Nature, shows that dogs have more genes involved in starch metabolism than wolves.

The finding suggests that this was a major factor in the evolution process of the wolf. No one knows exactly when or how our ancestors began to be so closely linked to dogs, but archaeological evidence indicates that it was thousands of years ago.

One theory suggests that modern behavior of the dogs came from the hunters that used wolves as guards or fellow hunters.

But another theory – that underpins the study – suggests that domestication began when the wolves began to approach the villages in search of food, stealing the remains left by people.

This practice became increasingly common and as a result, wolves began to live around humans. According to this second hypothesis, when we became sedentary and dependent on agriculture, waste dumps created around our settlements soon became the power source of many wolves, explains Erik Axelsson, of the University of Uppsala.

You will need to go here to read the full article, but I will offer this further piece:

Dr. Axelsson and colleagues examined the DNA of more than 50 modern breeds – from the Cocker Spaniel to the German Shepherd.

They then compared their genetic information with 12 wolves from around the world. They scanned DNA sequences of the two canids in areas with large differences. They assumed that these areas contained genes that could help explain the domestication of dogs. Axelsson’s team identified 36 regions, with more than one hundred genes.

The analysis detected the presence of two major functional categories – genes involved in brain development and starch metabolism.

The latter suggests that dogs have many more genes encoding enzymes needed to break down starch, a feature that could have been advantageous to the ancestors who rummaged among the wheat and corn of the farmers.

“The wolves also have these genes, but not used as efficiently as dogs,” said Dr. Axelsson.

“When we look at the wolf genome, we only see one copy of the gene [for the amylase enzyme] on each chromosome. When we look at the dog genome, we see a range from two to fifteen copies; and on average a dog carries seven copies more than the wolf.”

“That means the dog is a lot more efficient at making use of the nutrition in starch than the wolf.”

As for the genes related to brain development, these probably reflect some of the behavioral differences we now see in the two canids.

The dog is an animal that is much more docile, which is probably due to the past humans preferring to work with animals that were easier to tame.

“Previous experiments have indicated that when you select for a reduction in aggressiveness, you obviously get a tamer animal but you also get an animal that retains juvenile characteristics much longer during development, sometimes into adulthood,” said Dr. Axelsson.

This may help explain why it is said that dogs act like puppies throughout their lives.

The study of the origin of dogs is still, in many ways, a puzzle.

Fossil evidence suggests that some populations have been around for tens of thousands of years, long before the advent of agriculture. One reason why it is so difficult to determine the time of this change of behavior is that domestication may have occurred more than once.

Over on YouTube, there are many videos about the subject of ‘the science of dogs’, albeit many of them lengthy. But so what!

I have gone for a 2013 Documentary film that has found its way on to YouTube: Wolf and Human – The Creation of The Dog (Full Nature Documentary). It is 90-minutes long and, at the time of writing this post, Jean and I haven’t watched it.  We will this evening. But it comes highly rated and I very much hope it is a good film.  The title of the film is perfectly aligned with the theme of today’s post. (N.B. We had bandwidth issues last night and gave up the struggle after just eleven minutes.  Despite the poor resolution of the video, it still looked like an interesting video to watch in full.)