Dog Domestication: Did The Wolf Tame Itself To Eventually Evolve Into The Dog?

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Dog Domestication: Did The Wolf Tame Itself To Eventually Evolve Into The Dog?

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Popular thinking has it that the humans domesticated the
wolf about 15,000 years ago in the Mesolithic period when permanent settlements
were becoming all the rage. In theory this sound good and well after all the
dog is a descendant of the wolf and indeed the two canids (both come from the
family Canidae) can interbreed. In fact it is on this basis that some argue
that the dog is really a subspecies of the wolf.

Although it is instinctive to
assume that man did indeed tame the wolf which tamed animals then eventually evolved
into the domesticated dog, there is a gaping flaw in this theory! The flaw is
that this theory assumes that Mesolithic humans had the time or the
intelligence to invest in a selective breeding program that aimed to create a
tamer wolf; this would have necessarily meant that those people had hundreds of
tame wolves with which to select desired traits from…a notion that is simply
preposterous!

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Dog Domestication