The pups were all Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, or Lab-Golden mixes who were from assistance dog lines. The researchers tested 44 dog puppies who were between five and 18 weeks old. The seven puppies, from Canine Companions for Independence, are part of a long-term study funded by the National Institutes of Health to assess the effects that different rearing strategies have on the behavior and cognitive development of assistance dogs. The Duke Canine Cognition Center’s Puppy Kindergarten Spring 2020 class photo. Therefore, Salomons explains, “we would see these skills in wolf puppies too if they had the opportunity to learn from experience with humans.” So, wolves should be just as talented as dogs if they’re raised in the same human-centric environment. The Canid Ancestry Hypothesis states that both dogs and gray wolves inherited these communication skills from their common ancestor. This hypothesis predicts that in the current study, “we would see these skills in dog puppies but not wolf puppies.” Hare’s lab and first author on the research paper, the Domestication Hypothesis states that as early dogs diverged from their wolf ancestor and lost their fear and aggression towards humans, they developed the ability to read us. According to Hannah Salomons, a doctoral student in Dr. What led to dogs’ uncanny ability to understand our communicative gestures? Scientists have developed two hypotheses: the Domestication Hypothesis and the Canid Ancestry Hypothesis.
And that evolution shaped not only dogs’ bodies and behavior but their brains as well. But how did dogs come to be? Nobody’s sure, but somewhere between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago, dogs began to evolve from that wild wolf ancestor to the human companion of today. Dogs and Wolves Share a Common Ancestorĭogs and gray wolves share a common ancestor and are so closely related they can interbreed and produce wolf-dog hybrids. Brian Hare’s lab at Duke University explored that very question.
But dogs are closely related to gray wolves, so how do wolves stack up in terms of understanding people? If wolf puppies receive the same around-the-clock human attention as dog puppies, can they learn to read us too? Recent research published in Current Biology from Dr. In fact, even mother-reared chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives, can’t compete with dogs when it comes to reading the gestures we use to cooperate, such as pointing. Although your cat or your horse may read your emotions, no other animal reads human gestures like a dog. The relationship you have with your dog is unlike that of any other pet.
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