Myth-busting Monday: “Dogs descended from wolves”.

Schooling 4 Dogs

Myth-busting Monday: “Dogs descended from wolves”.

This is a misstatement. Dogs and wolves share a common ancestor, just like we share a common ancestor with chimps. That doesn’t mean we descended from modern day chimps, just like it doesn’t mean that dogs descended from modern day wolves. Clearly, we cannot use chimp behaviour as a means to understand human behaviour. So why would we use wolf behaviour as a means to study dog behaviour?

Wolves and domestic dogs do have very similar DNA to the extent that they can breed and produce viable offspring. However, dogs can also breed with coyotes, jackals and dingos. That doesn’t mean that their behaviour is the same, nor does it mean that our canine companions are ‘tame wolves’.

Domestic dogs did not evolve because humans reared primitive wolf cubs and selected for tamer and tamer wolves, this is a romanticised idea. Dogs very likely domesticated themselves. Wolves as we know them did not exist yet by the time that early domestic dogs began to appear. Primitive dogs had already split from the primitive wolflike ancestor and dogs and wolves were evolving on different paths. Primitive dogs became progressively more tame by associating more closely with human settlements, with the more bold and least aggressive dogs more able to gain access to human resources. The grey wolf we know today is just as modern as our domestic dogs, and they have both diverged from their common, primitive ancestor.

Modern wolves have become specialised cooperative predators and live very different lives to modern dogs, who evolved to become generalised scavengers and to display all the physiological features of domestication syndrome. There are huge differences between dogs and wolves beyond just genetics. Even wolf cubs that have been hand-reared by humans are dramatically different to domestic dogs of the same age.

Wolves are much more adept at problem-solving than domestic dogs and tend to be persistent in their tasks, whereas dogs are more likely to give up and defer to humans for help. Even hand-reared wolves will not look at humans for help. Domestic dogs are also better at following human gestures and attention cues than hand-reared wolves. Wolves also have a much shorter critical period for socialisation than dogs do and are not capable of forming strong attachments with humans or other species such as cats, like dogs can. Even at a few weeks old, hand-reared and extensively-socialised wolf cubs will show aggression and fear to humans, unlike dog puppies with the same rearing environment. Furthermore, even hand-reared wolf cubs will not engage in eye contact with humans, something that domestic dogs offer naturally.

The study on captive wolves that provoked the ‘dominance myth’ and still haunts dog behaviour to this day was never designed to be a way of interpreting natural wolf behaviour, never mind domestic dog behaviour. The wolves studied were in a highly stressful captive environment with no freedom to disperse, causing huge social conflict. The behaviour observed in the study does not even replicate wild wolf behaviour, never mind that of our domestic dogs. David Mech, the scientist behind this study, has talked openly about how wrongly his studies have been interpreted: https://youtu.be/tNtFgdwTsbU

More reading:
'Integrating social ecology in explanations of wolf–dog behavioral differences' – Marshall-Pescini et al

'A Simple Reason for a Big Difference: Wolves Do Not Look Back at Humans, but Dogs Do' – Mikloski et al

'Species-Specific Differences and Similarities in the Behavior of Hand-Raised Dog and Wolf Pups in Social Situations with Humans' – Gacsi et al.