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Dogs may have domesticated themselves because they really liked snacks, model suggests (www.livescience.com)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

My understanding is that dogs were domesticated from a now-extinct species that was the common ancestor of dogs and gray wolves, but not descended from them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I read about this just recently. It was more of an evolutionary cousin thing; dogs and wolves diverged like a million years ago, well before we were in the picture. The ones humans ran into on our way out of Africa would have been from a different subspecies, and potentially were prone to domestication from the start, while the ones that became modern wolves were confined to (now submerged) Beringia until the end of the ice age.