How long have dogs been man's best friend?

The top household pet in the UK is a dog. Known as man's best friend, fossil data has shown dogs have been our companions for a very long time. Julia Ravey asked Gregor Larson just how long have we had dogs as part of our pack...

Greger - That's a question that we're all trying to answer. We can give you bounds: we have an upper bound of 30,000-35,000 (years) and I think anything further than that is maybe a bit ridiculous and even I'm a little bit suspicious of that number. Then, a lower bound of maybe 14,000-15,000, something like that. So, somewhere in that period, there is a pack of wolves somewhere that goes from being very 'wolfy' to being very much associated with people. You get this emergent product of this changing relationship between people and wolves which results in what we would now recognise as dogs. That precedes any other animal with which we've made these amazing relationships by many, many thousands of years.

Julia - Did all the dogs we have today come from one pack millennia ago?

Greger - Another good question to which I will give you another ambiguous answer. We know it was grey wolves. We're not entirely sure which population of grey wolves or where they were at the time. We know that there were other populations of grey wolves that at some point contributed some of the DNA. Whether that was a completely independent process or not is an open question, but it was likely to be one primary source and then maybe a couple secondary and tertiary sources.

Julia - And what was it about these dog ancestors that made us join forces?

Greger - There are two schools of thought on this: there is the school of thought which theorises that it was very human led; very directed - we saw these wolves on the landscape and we thought either they looked cute or we can think of them as somehow being a really good partner in crime. So, let's steal a couple of puppies from a den, bring them over to the human camp (maybe even suckle them), take care of them, tame them and if they started to become a bit unruly, then we can knock them on the head or send them away. But for the ones that were quite nice, then we let them stick around, and then they started to produce more tame versions of themselves and, through that whole process, you get dogs. I am not a fan of that particular theory. I think that that's not how anything actually works within evolutionary biology or within the way in which we interact with the natural world and, instead, I think it was much more of an emergent process whereby you had a pack of wolves and a group of people and they started to form a kind of loose accidental alliance that then over a very long period of time started to result in both populations becoming more reliant upon one another. Now, as for the precise mechanisms that were driving this, there are a lot of different theories about that: there was one that was just published last year that suggests in the very Northern climes, where humans struggle to eat exclusively meat, wolves don't have a problem with this. So, if we were hunting a lot of mammoths, for example, in a very high step environment in Siberia or in the Arctic, there would be a whole lot of excess protein that we wouldn't necessarily be able to consume but those wolves would have, so they would've been attracted to us. We wouldn't have minded necessarily having them around because of a variety of other things that they could have offered us, including help with hunting or a number of other processes, but it's hard to recreate that. There's a lot more theories than there are answers at the moment, but I tend to think that the idea that it was much more of an emergent accidental process is the one that we should be asking the questions about rather than just insisting that we grabbed a couple of cute puppies and then we were done with it.

Julia - David asked if our pet dogs are more intelligent than other wild animals. Did we domesticate dogs to be good boys?

格雷格-这个问题总是错误我因为年代oon as you use the word "domesticate" as a verb like that, it's conveying that we did something to something else and it implies this intentionality of the whole thing. And of course, as I'm sure the rest of the panel would agree, intelligence is such a plastic term. It's a super goofy amorphous thing and it's very context specific. So, there are the dogs within a human context who are very good at recognising our gestures, recognising us, recognising commands - they are going to be smart within that particular context - and there are wolves who are smart in their own context and their own environments where they don't do that, but it doesn't make them any more smart or more dumb. Any kind of very widely distributed species is very good at being distributed precisely because it's good at taking advantage of the local conditions in which it finds itself. So, the short answer to that question would be, yes, dogs are smart and are good boys precisely because they're here. It's a redundant question because we wouldn't have them otherwise.