Wolves Became Man’s Best Friend Even Before Dogs, Studies Show

The Atlantic

It’s always been known that a dog is a man’s best friend. The canine has been a great companion since time immemorial. They accompany their masters everywhere, and some even are there to take care of their humans. It’s always nice to see a person with his dog companion.

However, man may also have another best friend – the wolf. This may come as a surprise to many because people see wolves as wild, feral creature that cannot be tamed. However, that may not have been the case before.

Wolves have the ability to become man’s best friend. In fact, a new study showed that wolves had been the best friend of man before they evolved into what we now know as dogs. To prove this theory, scientists from the cold north wanted to prove that wolves are able to recognize certain people. Their findings showed that wolves are able to tell the difference between the people they know and the ones who were strange to them. The saw that wolves who were familiar with people showed more affection to what they saw as a familiar.

Even more so, the familiar human was able to calm them down and give help when the wolves are faced with a stressful situation. The reactions these canines showed that their attachment when they were domesticated around 15,000 years ago could have resulted to the dogs we know today.


So, the scientists studied and tested a total of 10 wolves and 12 dogs. They wanted to witness how the animals behaved when faced with new and stressful situations. They saw that the wolves showed the person they knew more affection. They did so by inching closer to the humans and spending more time when greeting them.

“It was very clear that the wolves, as the dogs, preferred the familiar person over the stranger,” said Dr. Hansen Wheat. He is a behavioral ecologist from Stockholm University, Sweden, and lead author of the study. “But what was perhaps even more interesting was that while the dogs were not particularly affected by the test situation, the wolves were. They were pacing the test room.”

“However, the remarkable thing was that when the familiar person, a hand-raiser that had been with the wolves all their lives, re-entered the test room the pacing behavior stopped, indicating that the familiar person acted as a social stress buffer for the wolves.”

This finding goes against the notion that the dog’s attachment to people only happened when they were domesticated and trained to be around humans. The study made had been published in the journal, Ecology and Evolution. As you read through it, the results demonstrate that this close link to people did not just evolve specifically in the dogs.


“I do not believe that this has ever been shown to be the case for wolves before and this also complements the existence of a strong bond between the animals and the familiar person,” added Dr. Wheat.

The team behind this worked at raising the wolf and dog puppies since they were ten days old. The test was conducted when the puppies were old enough, particularly when they were 23-weeks-old.

“Wolves showing human-directed attachment could have had a selective advantage in early stages of dog domestication.”

“Together with earlier studies making important contributions to this question, I think it is now appropriate to entertain the idea that if variation in human-directed attachment behavior exists in wolves, this behavior could have been a potential target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication.”

The close similarities between dogs and wolves had a lot of telltale signs about where the behavior we see in dogs had started from. Right now, Dr. Hansen Wheat and her team at Stockholm University are pushing on with their work so that they are able to learn even more about the behavioral similarities and differences between the two types of canines, and so far, their findings have revealed a lot.

 

 

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