Obama's Public Support of Michael Vick

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by blush

Yes, but is it ALL dog behavior is emulated from wolf infantile behaviors, or just the roots of dog behavior?

As I understand it (and neither wolves or dogs are my speciality nor my special interest) ALL dog behavior can be observed in wolves. However, for dogs the behavior may be vestigial.

For example:

Tail position isn't vestigial and neither is gaze. Those are *really* communicating something. Shaking actually helps in thermoregulation.

Scent rolling and cache burying, on the other hand, are largely vestigial behaviors. Scent rolling is probably a way of camouflaging their own scent when hunting and cache burying is, of course, a way of storing up food for lean times. However, with modern dogs neither circumstance really obtains under normal (for domestic pet dogs) circumstances.

Here's the thing, at the outside domestication of wolves started around 30,000 years ago. We know that by 9,000 years ago (7000 BCE) dogs had been domesticated. Even if we accept the outer timeline, 30K years seems, to us, like FOREVER but in an evolutionary time frame that *just* happened.

Behaviorally modern Homo sapiens date to probably no earlier than 50 - 70K years ago and anatomically modern humans date to probably no earlier than 150,000 years ago. All modern Homo sapiens are descended from a population of no larger than about 10 - 15K breeding individuals living in Africa around 75,000 years ago. That 75K years has been enough time for us to evolve the different racial groups, some interesting mutations like red and blonde hair and blue and green eyes. The only other major adaptations that I can think of that have happened since then was lactose tolerance--which almost certainly cannot predate, by much, the invention of agriculture.

Our brains, however haven't changed very much in the last 25,000 years. If someone built a time machine, went back in time to 25K years ago and grabbed any dozen random infants and then came back to 2011 there is NOTHING that those children could not learn. Most likely, something very similar is operating with dogs. The thing is, we selected for immaturity (mature wolves being kind of dangerous), and friendliness to humans. But I doubt that your average dog brain is THAT different from the average wolf brain. They've had maybe 20 or 30K years with us, compared to the *millions* of years of evolution before they adopted us or we adopted them. Their brains are running an extraordinarily successful program and since almost NONE of the vestigial behaviors have any kind of costs in terms of reproductive fitness (the only currency evolution gives a damn about) I doubt that most of those wolf-like behaviors will disappear anytime soon.

Cheers
Aj