Dogs may have domesticated themselves because they really liked snacks, model suggests
Competing theories explain how dogs came to be domesticated from wolves. Now, a new study adds further support to the idea that they domesticated themselves.
If huskies being the closest breed of domestic dog to an undomesticated wolf is any indication: I totally believe it. Those dogs will do literally anything for a tasty treat. And so would I, for that matter.
"What would you do for a Klondike bar?"
"I have killed and would kill again."
Ironic actually because as I understand it, and I am far from an expert, huskies are on the lower side of the food motivated scale when it comes to dog breeds.
Krapolis is a meh show, but I watched it all for Matt Berry and Richard (won't even try to spell, Moss from IT Crowd)...
But their episode on the domestication of wolves was amazing.
Must be why cats leave dead mice and birds for you; they see you like a human sees a dog and offer a snack in exchange for ownership claims
I mean, same
Every species can domestic themselves, even humans did it.
We show every charistic of it, even if people don't like talking about it.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/10/31/928764215/how-humans-domesticated-themselves
Even Silverbacks, long thought to be the proverbial "alpha males" don't force females into their harems and recent research have shown that the Silverback they choose to follow is often the most compassionate one rather than just the biggest and strongest.
They're just all fucking huge, so it's really not that important if one is slightly bigger.
That article doesn't mention it, but more prevalent Neoteny is likely another thing caused by humans domesticsting themselves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny_in_humans
When people look back at films of the public from 100 years ago and notice that men in general seem to be less baby faced and have sharper features... they're not wrong.
More and more adult women have pelvises and birth canals incapable of safely delivering a baby without a C Section.
When people look back at films of the public from 100 years ago and notice that men in general seem to be less baby faced and have sharper features… they’re not wrong.
More so because everyone was a raging alcoholic that spent their time outside and sunscreen hadn't been invented yet...
Even the argument that an older father results in longer telemeres in a child and a longer time till aging sets in...
Old guys were marrying very young girls 100 years ago too.
More and more adult women have pelvises and birth canals incapable of safely delivering a baby without a C Section.
True, but that's the same reason we started to de-volve the appendix and then stopped: advancement of modern medical treatment.
An insane amount of women used to die in childbirth, while other cranked out 15 kids from the time they were 14 till they were 30.
Wanna guess if there was a correlation in hip size?
We don't have that evolutionary pressure anymore, so women with narrow hips can have just as many kids as women with wide hips.
When you remove evolutionary pressure, things that used to be selected against start becoming prevelant again.
I’m a bitch for chips.
Inversely, it feels almost instinctive for humans to offer treats to animals they meet. Despite science being clear it’s a bad thing to do, it’s really hard to convince people not to feed wildlife for example.
Also petting them, we just want to pet everything especially if it's somewhat fluffy and soft, even if that's really not a good idea (and i don't mean "haha i wanna pet the crocodile" i mean petting parrots, which is a sex thing for them and makes them VERY confused and frustratedly horny)
That's not a very good headline. Of course they did it for food, the model was about whether they could have domesticated themselves fast enough without being forced.
I'll have to actually look into the research; I have trouble imagining how one would model that in silico.
Edit: A link. Looks like they assumed human tolerance only effects odds of getting human food, and is (except for occasion mutants) inherited as a random point in between the mother and father's.
"When females were selecting mates, they also had to select males that had a similar tameness to themselves," study co-author Alex Capaldi, a mathematician and statistician at James Madison University in Virginia, told Live Science. "So if both of those processes are in play, then it is possible for the self-domestication hypothesis to beat the time constraint critique."
"Snax and chill."
The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet | Nature
Wouldn't you?
@RobotToaster same
Same here.
My understanding is that dogs were domesticated from a now-extinct species that was the common ancestor of dogs and gray wolves, but not descended from them.
I read about this just recently. It was more of an evolutionary cousin thing; dogs and wolves diverged like a million years ago, well before we were in the picture. The ones humans ran into on our way out of Africa would have been from a different subspecies, and potentially were prone to domestication from the start, while the ones that became modern wolves were confined to (now submerged) Beringia until the end of the ice age.