Reply #71: excerpt from a transcript of a great NOVA program concerning this [View All]

[minkyboodle]

NARRATOR: For Ray Coppinger and other dog experts who reject the adoption hypothesis, the challenge has been to find an alternative. How else might the journey from wolf to sled dog—and all the other diverse forms dogs take—have begun?

It was only when he started thinking about what was in it for the wolves that Coppinger came up with an answer. Now he's convinced wolves chose domestication, and they did so because of the easy pickings in a Stone Age equivalent of this Tijuana dump.

In a dump, an animal that's a little tamer, a little less likely to get scared off by people, has a better chance of finding food and surviving. It's true today and, Coppinger argues, it would have been just as true a long time ago.

RAY COPPINGER: Imagine 14,000 years ago when people first get the idea of living in a village. They settle down, they build permanent houses, and around that permanent...those permanent houses, all the waste products of their economies build up. You've got waste food; you've got waste materials of all kinds. Now there's a whole set of animals that move in on that. We know them now: we've got house mice, we've got cockroaches, we've got pigeons, we've got all kinds of animals that are living off the human waste. One of them is the wolf. The wolf moves into that kind of a, of a setting, that new niche, that new foraging area, and it's great. You don't have to chase anything, you don't have to kill anything. You just wait; people dump it in front of you.

NARRATOR: Not every animal can take advantage of this resource. Most wild animals run away when humans approach. The few that don't, have a real advantage. They're going to get most of the food, and that means their offspring are more likely to survive. Each new generation becomes increasingly tame.

RAY COPPINGER: The ones that run away the first time anybody shows up, those are the ones that are going to be selected against, they're going to go out, have to make an honest living out in the wild. They're not going to be able to get enough out of that dump. So here's natural selection in action. Any one wolf that's a little tamer than the other, who can stay there longer, get more food, he's the one that's going to win that evolutionary battle.

full transcript here
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3103_dogs.html