So what we think happened was a very similar process to what happened in the foxes and of course the fox experiment happened over 50 years but many of the changes that were observed in the foxes happened after 20 generations of selection. So you can imagine if there are people becoming more sedentary, there's all this potential food resource, if there was a segment of the wolf population that were not fearful, that were able to be interested and approach human settlements, and take advantage of this completely new resource that was predictable, reliable, and actually relatively low risk --you're not going to get a hoof in your face while you're trying to hunt, well you have an amazing food resource now. And you could be at a selective advantage over wolves that decided to stay in their traditional approach to hunting and not relying on garbage from people. So imagine if this is how wolves evolved into dogs, boy that day that wolf decided to go start scavenging, just imagine the conversation they could have with their friends. When their friends were saying, you're gonna do what? I'm gonna go hunt some fresh meat. You go scavenge off the humans, fine. Boy, the guys that went out to hunt that day, they made the wrong decision. So, that's the idea, is that dogs actually are the result of natural selection, that we did not choose dogs, we did not choose to domesticate wolves into dogs. Wolves chose us. They started using a new resource, and as a result there was natural selection working on wolves and that changed their behavior. As we know from the foxes it almost certainly changed their morphology and then humans very quickly would have recognized the morphological differences between these wolves that scavenge and the wolves that actually they directly still are hunting and competing against, as has always been the case in the human wolf relationship. Humans probably would've been more tolerant to these scavengers than the hunters, and that would just increase the selective advantage for the wolves that decided to scavenge off of humans. What we know from genetic evidence is that dogs probably started to evolve somewhere around 12,000 to 40,000 years ago. That's right about the period where you see this sedentary behavior begin. In addition, the earliest archaeological evidence for dogs is just around that period, around 12,000 years and there's some little bit of variance and arguments about that date but the point is the earliest dogs are right around in there. So it seems that this could be a really nice explanation for the origin of dogs, is that they are the product of natural selection and they chose us, we didn't choose them. Now, I told you about Victorian England and the idea would be that more recently we have then selected very intentionally for dogs to have all these specialized traits that we see in all the breeds that we know and love. So I'm always, as a scientist, looking for ways, when I have a hypothesis like that, to test it further. And if it really is true, that when animals become in closer proximity to humans, that they start relying on human proximity for anything, that means they have to not be fearful, they have to be interested in being near where humans are. How could you test that further? Well, there are probably more animals than ever in the history of mammals living in close proximity to humans right now. I actually think that we are in the era of the largest domestication event that has ever occurred, because as cities cleared areas and animals were displaced, and cities grew up and humans inhabited, slowly but surely, wildlife has come back into urban areas, and certainly suburban areas. But to come back, you can't be fearful and you can't be overtly aggressive to people, because obviously, you're gonna get selected against. You're gonna have somebody not being very nice to you, or you're gonna meet an animal control officer. So, is it the case that there are animals that are actually experiencing changes like those that we are suggesting may have occurred when wolves evolved into dogs, and certainly what we saw in the foxes. Well, Key deer, living in the Florida Keys, are the best studied species in the modern time that may be undergoing this type of natural selection that results in self-domestication. Key deer are split into sort of two populations, one that's more rural and one that's more urban, and when those two populations have been compared over time, it ends up that they were very similar 30, 40 years ago to each other. But now the population that's living closer to urban areas, they are larger they are more social, and they are having more babies. And it's seems that there may be some evidence that even in deer when you are attracted to people and you're interested in people, that you can have natural selection acting on you to change. So, I really think we're in the biggest domestication event in pre or history, and we're going to see other species become self-domesticated. So in summary, it's unlikely the first dogs evolved from wolves due to humans intentionally breeding, through artificial selection, the nicest wolves together as we see in the Russian foxes. I think it's more likely that friendly wolves were at a selective advantage due to natural selection initially, and essentially wolves self-domesticated themselves. The friendliest wolves would have had an advantage scavenging from humans as our species became more sedentary 12 to 15,000 years ago. The selection for friendliness would have changed the behavior of these dog-like wolves, but also their morphology and cognition like we see in the foxes. And that, of course, could explain why not only humans would have recognized not to kill those wolves, but also why we have dogs now who are so good at reading human gestures. I think the most exciting part of this as somebody who is also interested in human evolution is the same process may be involved in self-domesticating other species today, but, as we're gonna talk about in the next lectures, it may be that this goes beyond just species interacting with us. It could be affecting other primates and even us.
