Dogs are called man’s best friends for a good reason. Throughout history, they have assisted humans in protection and hunting. Today many are kept as household pets. It is hard to imagine how they transitioned to this state from being wild wolves.
It seems that it started off around 20,000 – 40,000 years ago with wolves moving close to hunter-gather camps in order to eat scraps from human food. By around 7,000 years ago dogs were pretty much everywhere acting as what we would consider village pets. This means they don’t live in a specific person’s house but rather just hang around the village. The next major step was for humans to breed the dogs for specific purposes. For example, king shepherds were bred to herd sheep. Later on, other breeds like poodles were made which are purely for aesthetics (Briggs, 2017).
A study that looked at DNA from 71 different wolves from the past 100,000 years tried to find where wolf domestication happened. They found that modern and earlier dogs are more similar to Asian varieties compared to European. This would indicate that domestication happened in the East(Bergström, 2022).
Although, it also found that earlier dogs that originate from northeastern Europe, Siberia, as well as the Americas, seem to have a single, shared origin from an eastern source. While, early dogs from the Middle East, Africa, and southern Europe appear to also have DNA from wolves in the Middle East. This indicates that wolves may have gone through domestication more than once, in separate locations, and then later mixed together (Bergström, 2022).
Either way, I find it fascinating that a wild creature like a wolf has evolved into the domesticated dogs we know and love today.
Bergström, Anders, et al. “Grey Wolf Genomic History Reveals a Dual Ancestry of Dogs.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 29 June 2022, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04824-9.
Briggs, Helen. “How Did Dogs Become Our Best Friends? New Evidence.” BBC News, BBC, 18 July 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40638584.
Evolutionary Anthropology 