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Derr acknowledges that the story of the dog’s emergence (as distinct from its evolutionary forebear, the wolf) cannot be “neatly distilled.” Different estimates place the first appearance of dog-like creatures anywhere from 12,000 to 135,000 years ago. But Derr argues that the dog itself was an “evolutionary inevitability.” He suggests that dogs and humans — similar animals who “simply took to traveling with each other” tens of thousands of years ago, “and never stopped” —

Man's best friend serves as model for understanding human social behaviorChimpanzees share many of our genes, but dogs have lived with us for so long and undergone so much domestication that they are now serving as a model for understanding human social behavior, according to a new paper.

<p>Domesticated animals look - and act - differently from than their wild counterparts. Why?</p> <p>The experiment was derived out of a discussion student Brian Hare had with his adviser, Michael Tomasello, an expert in primate behavior at Emory University. They were talking about how bad chimpanzees were at understanding human social cues. Despite being the heavyweights of animal intelligence, chimps were insensitive to what seemed to be obvious hints: They failed to pick up a cup hiding food even when the experimenter stared at it, pointed to it, and even tapped it. Tomasello wanted to talk about what this meant about the limits of nonhuman intelligence. Hare, a pet owner, had a down-to-Earth response: ''My dogs can do this.''</p>

Scientists believe cats 'sort of domesticated themselves' THE WASHINGTON POST June 29, 2007 WASHINGTON – Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision. But don't take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way – about 12,000 years, actually. Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published today in the journal Science. The findings, drawn from the analysis of nearly a thousand...

Wolves were domesticated no more than 16,300 years ago in southern China, a new genetic analysis suggests—and it's possible the canines were tamed to be livestock, not pets, the study author speculates. "In this region, even today, eating dog is a big cultural thing," noted study co-author Peter Savolainen, a biologist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. "And you can also see in the historical records as far back as you can go that eating dogs has been very common" in East Asia. "Therefore, you have to think of the possibility that this was one of the...

"The Dixie Dingo" "The Native American Dog" "The American Dingo" " Southern Aboriginal Dog" "The Indian's Dog" Still living Wild in the bottom land swamps and forests of the Southeastern United States. Genetic (mitochondrial DNA) testing being performed at the University of South Carolina, College of Science and Mathematics, indicates that these dogs, related to the earliest domesticated dogs, are the remnant descendants of the feral pariah canids who came across the Bering land mass 8,000 to 11,000 years ago as hunting companions to the ancestors of the Native Americans. However, their future in the wild looks bleak. Loss ...

Some dogs may look like their owners, but all dogs imitate their human companions If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, dogs often shower us with praise. New research has just determined dogs automatically imitate us, even when it is not in their best interest to do so. The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides the first evidence that dogs copy at least some of our body movements and behaviors in ways that are spontaneous and voluntary.

Biologists chase down pooches' genetic and social past A Shaggy Dog History Two-kilogram teacup poodles; 90-kg mastiffs; slender greyhounds; squat English bulldogs: For a single species, canines come in a vast array of shapes and sizes. Even more remarkably, they all come from the same stock. Many millennia ago, humans took in a few primitive wolves and made them man's best friend. Or so the story goes. For centuries, researchers have doggedly pursued the evolutionary and social history of canines, with mixed success. Only subtle differences distinguish dogs from coyotes, jackals, and other canids, making family trees difficult to construct...

It's no secret to any dog-lover or cat-lover that humans have a special connection with animals.... paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University argues that this human-animal connection goes well beyond simple affection. Shipman proposes that the interdependency of ancestral humans with other animal species... played a crucial and beneficial role in human evolution over the last 2.6 million years... "Having sharp tools transformed wimpy human ancestors into effective predators who left many cut marks on the fossilized bones of their prey," Shipman said. Becoming a predator also put our ancestors into direct competition with other carnivores for carcasses and...

They have lived in our homes, been members of the family, slept on our laps for over 10,000 years. Yet it is only recently that science has begun to answer how it is that cats and dogs came to be our most prized companion animals - discovering, along the way, how the domestication of cats and dogs actively helped change the course of human history. "Domestication," says scientist Carlos Driscoll, "is evolution that we can see." Driscoll is a researcher at Oxford University and the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, where much of the world's leading work on cats has...

Scientists believe that two 33,000-year-old skulls unearthed in digs in Siberia and Belgium show dogs were domesticated long before any other animal, such as sheep, cows or goats. Researchers from the University of Arizona said the skulls had shorter snouts and wider jaws than undomesticated animals such as wolves, which use their longer snouts and narrower jaws to help them hunt. That suggested the dogs had been kept for protection and companionship by our ancient ancestors -- just as they are today. The researchers think dogs could have been the first species of animals to be domesticated by humans, long...

A little while ago I made my wife laugh by doing an impression of a dog acting guilty. After the laughter subsided I started thinking: How does a dog even know how to act guilty? Guilt is not an emotion in any part of the rest animal kingdom except perhaps to a much lesser extent in cats and maybe chimpanzees although I am not sure about the latter due to little contact with chimps. Cats have such a superiority complex that they really don't show much guilt about anything. But dogs go completely overboard in the guilt department. You come...

World's dogs are descended from Asian wolves Scientists have found that almost all dogs share a common gene pool after analysing the DNA of hundreds of dogs from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. They have concluded domesticated dogs originated from wolves in East Asia nearly 15,000 years ago. The animals travelled with humans through Europe and Asia and across the Bering Strait with the first settlers in America. Swedish and Chinese scientists studied the genes of 654 dogs and found a higher genetic diversity among East Asian dogs suggested that people there were the first to domesticate dogs from...

A very well-preserved 33,000 year old canine skull from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication ever found. But the specimen raises doubts about early man's loyalty to his new best friend as times got tough. The findings come from a Russian-led international team of archaeologists. The skull, from shortly before the peak of the last ice age, is unlike those of modern dogs or wolves. The study is published in the open access journal Plos One. Although the snout is similar in size to early, fully domesticated Greenland dogs from...

Washington - Research has long indicated that all dogs, from prissy Pekingese to slobbering St. Bernards, are the domesticated descendants of wolves. But scientists have tussled like puppies over the question of when and where the transition from wild carnivore to newspaper-toting pet began - and why, exactly, dogs and humans have gotten along so well. Now, a new analysis of dog DNA pegs East Asia as the place where wolves and people began their dance of co-domestication - not Europe or the Middle East, as some experts have contended. The work also suggests that domestication began about 15,000 years...

While a postdoc at Cornell University a few years ago, Adam Boyko became curious about the little-studied village vagrants. Though dogs were first domesticated 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, most breeds go back only a few hundred years. Perhaps village dog DNA might shed light on the long, early history of domestication, when canines were hanging around humans yet not under our domain. But how to get samples? As it happened, around the same time Boyko's brother Ryan had married, and he and wife Corin were looking for a cheap honeymoon off the beaten track. The three Boykos decided to...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070125-dogs-video.htmlRELATED Video: Working Dogs Go Beyond "Man's Best Friend" Video: Dog Whisperer Tackles Pit Bull Terror Dogs: Photos, Video, Audio, and More January 25, 2007—Though they come in many different sizes and temperaments, all domesticated dogs living today are descended from just a few wild wolves that roamed Asia some 15,000 years ago. But why, out of all of the animals that humans have domesticated, have dogs become so close to their owners? Join an anthropologist as he conducts experiments on both wild dogs and down-home pups to figure out why dogs are so good at communicating with humans. Video...

Dog: man's best friend for over 33,000 years He's been man's best friend for generations. An ancient dog skull found in Siberia and dating back 33,000 years presents some of the oldest known evidence of dog domestication. When combined with a similar find in Belgium, the two skulls indicate that the domestication of dogs by humans occurred repeatedly throughout early human history at different geographic locations -- rather than at a single domestication event, as previously believed. "Both the Belgian find and the Siberian find are domesticated species based on morphological characteristics," said Greg Hodgins, a researcher at the University...

A Basenji is a dog breed indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa. Humans might have first domesticated dogs from wolves in Africa, with Egypt being one possibility, since wolves are native to that region. Modern humans originated in Africa, and now it looks like man's best friend first emerged there too. An extensive genetic study on the ancestry of African village dogs points to a Eurasian — possibly North African — origin for the domestication of dogs. Prior research concluded that dogs likely originated in East Asia. However, this latest study, the most thorough investigation ever on the ancestry of African village...

Earliest Domesticated Dogs Uncovered By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Skull of a Stone Age Dog April 7, 2003 — The skulls of two Stone Age dogs believed to be the earliest known canines on record have been found, according to a team of Russian scientists. The dog duo, which lived approximately 14,000 years ago, appear to represent the first step of domestication from their wild wolf ancestors. Mikhail Sablin, a scientist at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, along with his colleague Gennady Khlopachev, analyzed the dog remains, which were found at the Eliseevichi...