USFWS/Wikimedia

The advent of a two-legged primate that was a competitor, a dangerous predator, but also a glorious garbage generator, could have represented a combination of stress and opportunity that both accelerated variation and opened up a new ecological niche. Whether it was the waste dumps of Mesolithic settlements or, much earlier, the mass kills of mammoths driven over cliffs, Homo’s leavings would have offered pretty easy pickings for those wolves that perhaps weren’t the best at being wolves, but that therefore, with nothing to lose, made bold to approach man. (Not so unlike the low-status humans from all over the world who have flourished by evolving into Americans!) “Kayye Nynne” explains the theory, introduced by Ray and Lorna Coppinger in their book Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution, that “wild canids . . . domesticated themselves”:

The wolf is far too skittish to make an efficient scavenger, running a long
distance off at the slightest hint of danger or the approach of anybody.
. . . [M]ost wolves will take an inordinately long time before daring to venture back to the dump site . . .

But just suppose there were certain wolves that didn’t display the usual level of skittishness . . . Maybe such wolves were less wary because they were driven by a need to sate their hunger. Such wolves would have been smaller than the other individuals in the wolf pack and thus would have been weaker and ranked lowest in the social structure of the pack. This meant they would have eaten last and gotten the least amount of nourishment thereby compounding their relatively small stature. A human dump site would have been especially appealing to such a wolf.

Over time this type of wolf may have dissociated itself from the pack and stuck around the human settlement instead. . . . Gradually such wolves would have become habituated to humans losing all fear of them altogether. . . . Eventually a couple of such wolves would have mated
. . . This would have accounted for the isolation and inbreeding necessary for a species to evolve from another.

But low fear is not just a product of desperation or habituation. It’s also a matter of inborn temperament. In one of the most famous and fascinating genetic experiments ever undertaken, the forty-year Siberian “farm-fox experiment,” Russian geneticist Dmitri K. Belyaev set out in 1959 to selectively breed a tame variant of the fur-farmed but still wild silver fox. Breeding individuals were chosen for one single trait: they did not try to bite or flee when approached and touched by humans. Only 5 percent of males and 20 percent of females qualified. Over the decades, Belyaev succeeded in creating an "elite" strain of tame foxes that are amazingly doglike—they eagerly approach humans, wag their tails, whine, and lick your face. (As kits, these foxes turn out to be as good as puppies at responding to people’s point and gaze signals.)

In the tenth generation, 18 percent of the foxes born were “elite.” By the thirtieth generation, three-quarters of them were. The tame foxes had much lower corticosteroid (stress hormone) levels and higher serotonin levels than their wild-type ancestors and cousins. Most remarkable of all, like dogs (and many other domestic animals), they also tended to have floppy ears, broader skulls, shorter muzzles, curly tails, and spotted, wavy coats—juvenile traits retained into adulthood, as are their puppylike behaviors.

The explanation? According to Lyudmila Trut, the late Belyaev’s colleague and successor, who wrote the 1999 journal article on the experiment (PDF):

Many of the polygenes determining behavior may be regulatory, engaged in stabilizing an organism’s early development, or ontogenesis. . . . [T]he genes that orchestrate those events and keep them on track [which are ancient and broadly shared across the animal kingdom] have a powerful role to play. Which genes are they? . . . [T]he lead role belongs to the genes that control the functioning of the neural and endocrine systems. Yet those same genes also govern the systems that control an animal’s behavior . . . So, in principle, selecting animals for behavioral traits can fundamentally alter the development of an organism.

The retention of juvenile traits is called neoteny or paedomorphism, and the funny thing is, human beings also display it. It’s one of the things that strikingly differentiates us from our chimpanzee cousins: even as adults, we have childlike high, rounded foreheads and small jaws, and we can remain affectionate, curious, and playful throughout life. Hare and Tomasello (repeat link) note that adult chimpanzees have an antagonistic, “every man for himself” disposition that starkly limits their ability to cooperate, and that before we could develop complex societies and cultures (and induct other animals into them), we had to domesticate ourselves, via “selection on systems controlling emotional reactivity”—i.e., preferring mates who didn’t bite or run away when touched! For both humans and our first canid “commensals,” such temperamental “predomestication” opened up “a new adaptive space” in which lots more social and cognitive coevolution could happen. The kinship between us thus is regarded by many scientists less as a deliberate human creation than as a case of convergent evolution.

Obviously, many of us humans have also held on to parts of our chimp-like heritage, which must also have been adaptive in its way. (That’s why my husband always greets dog owners with the opening line, “They’re nicer than most people!”) Dogs, too, have retained parts of their wolf heritage—pack loyalty, willingness, deference to alpha—though the Coppingers believe (repeat link) that the latter theme is overemphasized in dog training. In one of the most unabashedly romantic pieces of scientific speculation I’ve ever read, “Co-evolution of Humans and Canids” (PDF), Austrian ethologist Wolfgang M. Schleidt and photographer Michael D. Shalter propose that as dogs became more humanlike, humans also became more doglike, in ways that lifted us above our primate pettiness. (I can’t help thinking of Mark Twain’s remark, “If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.”) In short, Schleidt and Shalter suggest that what we have of nobility and ethics and selflessness, we got from wolves!

Sometime during the last Ice Age, our ancestors teamed up with pastoralist wolves. First, presumably, some humans adopted the wolves’ life style as herd followers and herders of reindeer and other hoofed animals. Wolves and humans had found their match. We propose that first contacts between wolves and humans were truly mutual, and that the subsequent changes in both wolves and humans are understood best as co-evolution. . . .

When we try looking back at the biological foundations of our moral behavior in a distant past, and, in the absence of any historical evidence turn to our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, we find ourselves in a strange conflict. The life of chimpanzees, especially their sociality, as revealed by the pioneering work of Jane GOODALL and others . . . appears as a frightful caricature of human egoism. . . .

[Goodall:] “Chimpanzees are individualists. They are boisterous and volatile in the wild. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to get the better of each other. They are not pack animals. . . . If you watch wild chimps, you see the love between mother and offspring, and the bonds between siblings. Other relationships tend to be opportunistic. And even between family members, disputes often rise that may even lead to fights.” . . .

The first insight we get from chimpanzee society is: “We have come a long way.” The high morality we claim as achievement of our species, however, is a very thin veneer on the old ape, and our newspapers are full of stories that reflect more chimpanzee than human ethics. . . .

© Marli

Strangely, [the] humaneness … which many admire and hold, at least in theory, to be the highest achievement of humanity, was invented millions of years ago by early canids . . . and honed to perfection by members of the pack-hunting canid species . . .

The closest approximation to human morality we can find in nature is that of the gray wolf, Canis lupus.

For a good yarn, at least, about how humans might literally have been raised by wolves—infused with the canid courtesy and loyalty so lamentably lacking in our primate genes—read the whole thing (repeat link, PDF).

(Annie Gottlieb)

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