on origins of dogs

[Bruce Schwartz]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/anim ... tudy-news/

[mtlhdr]

Interesting. I was reading something the other day about whether dogs potentially were domesticated more than once. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-ne ... 180964101/

[Bruce Schwartz]

Yes... good article. Thanks. Here's another recent article about North American dogs that were buried ritualistically by native Americans pre contact with Europeans and being distinctly different dogs. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... ster-ctvt/

[crackerd]

Bruce, didn't American Water Spaniels once look like Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers, or was that vice versa ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/science/foxes-tame-genetics.html

MG

[bhennessy]

Very interesting Smithsonian article I saw recently which cited some resent research that dogs essentially domesticated themselves. Those wolves that eventually developed a recognizion that there was opportunity with humans lived to reproduce more often. Amazingly the researchers think that dog-like traits like floppy eats and curly tails which made them less threatening to humans probably began to develop within a few generations.

It’s funny that we think we are the bosses of our dogs, but in the broader picture we may have been owned from day one by them. Love it.