> But after decades of dogged effort, he and his fellow scientists are still arguing about the answers.<p>> Other canine genetics experts think that Larson’s barking up the wrong tree.<p>> Of all the problems that scientists struggle with, why has the origin of dogs been such a bitch to solve?<p>It seems like the author was in some sort of pun writing competition.
This story has the vibe of a TED talk, it's got scientists with different opinions, a grand scope and scale of tens of thousands of years, plus dogs, which we all love.<p>I really do think humans were doing interesting things tens of thousands of years ago. Some of it was written down, and some of it only survives through oral traditions but the ideas and actions of those people in that era still impact us today.<p>Some of those things are animals like the cat that is trying to sit on my laptop right now.
I always wondered how come the first animal to be domesticated happened to be a predator? Sheep and goats seems much easier to control around and call it as domestication. I guess it had something to do with the way humans lived at that time, 30-40'000 years ago. I imagine that as hunters, they were more inclined to accept hunting helpers than to try herding herbivores.
Same story from the CNRS:<p><a href="https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/rethinking-the-origin-of-dogs" rel="nofollow">https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/rethinking-the-origin-of-dogs</a>
I thought the common wisdom (not saying it's correct) was that dogs had been domesticated several times (not just twice) and most modern dog breeds are derived from a mix of different (but closely related) animals?
Before getting to the domestication question, I think they need to figure out exactly what they mean by 'wolf'. The lines are blurry.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coydog" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coydog</a>