Scientists don’t know exactly how wolves were domesticated into early dogs, but it’s possible that they domesticated themselves by choosing to coexist with humans so that, a new study finds, they could be fed consistently. Then, these snackish canines likely selected mates that did the same.
While the theory is nothing new…new research shows it’s statistically possible for the wolves to have driven their own domestication into dogs through natural selection.
The model showed that over 15,000 years, natural selection could potentially drive dog self-domestication. But for this to happen, two conditions had to be met: Wolves had to choose to stay near humans to eat food scraps, and they had to select mates with a similar temperament.
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“When females were selecting mates, they also had to select males that had a similar tameness to themselves,” study co-author Alex Capaldi, a mathematician and statistician at James Madison University in Virginia, told Live Science. “So if both of those processes are in play, then it is possible for the self-domestication hypothesis to beat the time constraint critique.”
