There’s some interesting work out there on domestication. I’ve read Jared Diamond’s book, and as someone who grew up on a farm I think his ideas could be expanded on.
A lot of domesticated animals will go feral very rapidly. I’d like to see that Russian doctor run the experiment in reverse and see how many generations it would take to make the silver foxes ‘wild’ again. Anyone who’s handled cattle for example knows that they can be herded, but if you’re not careful they’ll attack you (never get in a corral w/ cattle unless you know what you’re doing). So are they really ‘domesticated’ or just ‘controlled’? Even horses (who are god’s gift to humans; big, dumb, tractable and able to pull or carry heavy weights), seem to be only marginally above ‘tamable’. If you don’t handle the horse when they’re young, it’s remarkably hard to get them under saddle after a certain age. Not saying there haven’t been individual successes, but it’s hard.
It’s not so much that we ‘domesticated’ some species and that’s the end of it, it’s that we apply continuous pressure through selective breeding, handling, socialization, and in the case of quadupeds under physical restriction from roaming, to keep that species domesticated and keep the progeny under control.
And cats? Really, cats domesticated us. They manipulate us with the purring and the fluffiness and the cuteness. Why else is the internet filled with their pictures? They’ve reached the pinnacle of survival of the species, not by being intelligent, not by being strong, not by having opposable thumbs, but by being just so adorable.
Basically true on the cats. They’ve domesticated us more then we have domesticated them. There are arguments though that it was mutual with the dogs though. That we civilized together.
Well, dogs are pack animals just like humans. We pretty much fill spaces in each other’s hierarchical structures.
Horses and cattle are herd animals. We have learned to control that behavior, but I don’t think we’ve modified it. You’d have to ask someone who breeds bison to get a view of that. Maybe bison are different to control than regular cattle.
Cats, jeeze cats are just f*g aliens. (Although trainable…I once trained a cat to ring a bell hanging on the doorknob to go outside rather than have a litter box in the house. 3 days and done.)
But there’s the interesting fact that the domestic cat appears, from DNA evidence, to be older than domestication. Since it is known that the founding population was very small, one recent suggestion is that the domestic cat is descended from a rare strain of wildcat that was less neophobic than most, so that they were willing to walk up to humans and say, “Hi! Wha’cha doin’?” until it finally paid off. All speculation, of course.
This matches my theory. Cats are eight foot tall, scaly aliens with tenicles. We only think they’re cute, fluffy, and lovable because they have really good PR.
I’ve heard this as well … a few local wildcats showed up and cleaned out the mice and rats in the granaries around the dawn of agriculture. Humans basically just left them alone to do their work.
The domestication process began when the young ladies of the community bonded to the cats because the cats have facial features close to human infants. From here any young man who wished to share the bed of the young woman would need the cats’ permission. Thus began the selective breeding program which kinda sorta is the hallmark of domestication.
Every human advance has benefited cats more than humans …
I’m wondering about the benefit. It doesn’t seem that either species is benefiting by any mutualism. They forage for completely different foods so I see no reason why they might not mingle at times. On the other hand, both humans and wolves are predators. Each gains benefit from the other by working together. I’m weak on the “mutual taming” or “co-evolution” ideas. Humans themselves haven’t changed to suit the wolves needs, they’d be the same either way. The wolf however has changed profoundly and into the amazing varieties of dogs we see today.
Not clear to me. Humans allegedly shifted neural resources from smelling to cognition. That looks a lot like division of labor to me. Symbiotic wolves locate the prey (and warn of larger predators); humans hunt, flank and fling specially designed pointy sticks. Together they are more successful predators than each would be alone.
Yes, they are more successful together, and that’s the comparison I’m making between the human/wolf relationship and the baboon/wolf relationship. My concern is that there really hasn’t been enough time for humans to adapt to living with their wolves. I don’t think anyone really know when the dog was domesticated but it was long after humans evolved their large brains. What I ask myself is what would be different among humans if the dog never existed. Probably not as technologically advanced but physiologically I think humans would be the same.
Plus keep in mind that one use humans have for dogs is a food source, not sure how that would fit in to a “symbiotic” relationship.
In The Wolf in the Parlor, Jon Franklin points out that both humans and wolves lost about 10% of their brain volume around the point in time many scientists think we began living with each other. Both species were able to give up some very metabolically expensive brain tissue while still thriving. He posits that we “outsourced” certain sensory functions to dogs and they “outsourced” manipulatory hands and problem-solving to us.
The date of humans and canines moving in together is pretty speculative – this summer, Scientific American had an article pretty firmly coming down on the side of…well, several wildly conflicting dates. A larger study is underway that may or may not resolve this. But Franklin points to the fact that humans did, in fact change, at one point, and dogs might well be the reason or part of it.