It's one of the longest relationships in history. Scientists are reconsidering who started it.
A black-and-white Boston terrier named Chevy, as sleek and dapper as a seal in a tuxedo, trots crisply into the soundproof testing room. His jaunty confidence will fade quickly as a team of researchers subjects him to a series of psychological experiments that will daunt, dismay, and ultimately baffle him. Poor Chevy is about to be gaslit for the sake of science.
The data from these tests—plus DNA samples—will ultimately give Hecht new hints about what changed in dogs after their wild leap into tameness. Biologically, they are almost all wolf; technically, they’re the subspecies, but they are fundamentally different from their forebears. You can hand-raise a wild animal to be tame, and that individual might be gentle and mild-mannered. But domestication is a different story.
As the first domesticated species, dogs are also a model for how other mammals—including us—got that way. Scientists see in their genes and minds hints about our own unusually tolerant nature. During much of the human journey from just another primate to world-conquering hominid, our four-legged pals have been right by our side. They are our familiar, our echo, our shadow, and as we now look more closely into their eyes, we can glimpse a new image of ourselves.
Hecht already knew this history. But the show sparked a realization: Nobody had analyzed the foxes’ brains. Usually, humans breed goats or sheep or other domesticated animals for many traits, including temperament, size, and coat color, all of which might leave inadvertent marks on the mind. But differences between tame and regular fox noggins could be due only to selection on behavior—what Belyaev and Trut did.
In the sulci and peduncles of fox brains, Hecht might see signs of whether this theory or others hit the mark. She emailed Trut, who sent a few dozen specimens from recent generations of the Russian foxes, and used MRI to measure the relative size and shape of various structures in their brains. As the little guy gazes into each human’s eyes, little bursts of oxytocin likely erupt in his brain , findings from a 2015 study suggest. The hormone promotes bonding, which might be why canines are so good as therapy or emotional-support animals for people who have survived trauma.
More recently, Princeton University evolutionary biologist Bridgett vonHoldt discovered what might be the root of this affection. In the DNA of dogs, she and her team found a marker of evolutionary pressure on chromosome 6. In humans, equivalent mutations cause Williams-Beuren syndrome, a developmental disorder that leads to indiscriminate friendliness, or hypersociability. “I like to think that, in a very positive, adoring fashion, maybe dogs have the canine version of the syndrome,” she says.
In fact, research out of the Wolf Science Center has found that in some situations, these wild animals are actually more tolerant than dogs: Given food to share, dogs keep their distance from one another. Wolves bicker and snarl at first, then eat peacefully side by side. In one study, pairs of wolves or dogs must cooperate to retrieve a piece of meat; wolves work together effectively, but dogs were “abysmally bad,” says investigator Sarah Marshall-Pescini.
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