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ape to man, wolf to dog

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There are some facts of human evolution that are by now pretty much proven by science, and surely you who might be interested in this can google the sources.

One of such facts or at least probable causes, is that primitive humans made gradually an implicit alliance with wild jackals and wolves.

Let's consider the situation.

We, humans, used to be just one more hunter and prey animal, not even an apex in our loosely defined ecosystem. We gained gradually the status of apex predator and also gradually expanded our eastern African ecosystem to the whole World.

In time all big mammals became utterly subjugated to us, in fact all animals except those outside our scale range (insects, smaller critters, birds, fish. Except canis, wolves and jackals.

They were as exceptional as humans in their more rapid evolution. All species but humans seem to evolve at generational pace. Humans change faster than our genes, not requiring generations, or genetic evolution, but technology to evolve more rapidly. Wolves and jackals seem to be the only other species that could change faster than natural selection would have it. Most descendants of wolves are, because of our symbiotic adaptation, not endangered like most other medium and big mammals, but a technical pest in the form of dogs everywhere.

It seems that as humans befriended wolves and jackals instead of kill them or be killed by them, changes occurred in both species.

Dogs evolved from wolves, becoming less intelligent that wolves but more "socially" or specialized intelligent.

Humans, from apes, we lost most of our useful sense of smell and a lot of our nocturnal hearing, we delegated that tot the wolf jackal dogs, but instead we could develop our frontal lobe a lot more.

How is this, our deal with the wolves, our transformation from smart apes into civilized humans, and the transformation from wild wolves to house trained dogs, not a milestone in very recent human evolution, not worth analyzing further. what are the implications.

I am thrilled with this, do you have any feedback..

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wolves and dogs are not as conventionally intelligent as orcas, chimpanzees or even parrots. so I'm afraid I have to argue about some sort of social or pack (tribal) intelligence or simply way, that canis has that resulted so compatible, so symbiotic and so mutually beneficial.

is this game theory applied to biology or zoology.

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  • 1 month later...

No they're not. Though it depends on what you refer to when you say "species".

Wolves can interbreed with dogs and produce fertile offspring, so I suppose that means they're the same species scientifically. But wolves and dogs are different. Dogs never mature behaviorally beyond the maturity of a wolf pup. They exhibit wolf-pup-ish behaviors all their lives.

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Humans did not evolve from apes, evolutionary theory claims we have a common ancestor with apes. So where you got it from that we lost most of our smell and nocturnal hearing I have no idea, considering we dont know what attributes the common ancestor held. Do you wish to elaborate?

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  • 1 year later...

Well it seems that, a year after writing it, the only thing wrong about my first post continues to be the grammar and maybe spelling. It would seem that dogs indeed played an important role in making us civilized humans, or humans as we know it. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/humanitys-best-friend-how-dogs-may-have-helped-humans-beat-the-neanderthals/257145/

Just as there are wild dogs, coyotes and wolves, all of whom can interbreed with dogs, producing semi house trainable puppies, (commercial wolf dogs are about 3/4 dog, not even half), I wonder who constitute our family. Are lost tribes like the khoi san, 'pigmies' or andaman negrito as distant genetically to the rest of mankind as a wolf is to a husky? less? more?

Are we so homogeneous to the point that our closest biological cousin used to be the neanderthal which is either extinct or absorbed into the European and Basque population? Or is most of the human race homogeneous with a long tail of, quickly disappearing, pigmy cousins?

Is it a coincidence that these small human isolates (read andaman negrito, or central african pigmy) have not domesticated the dog? (*this is probaby if nof definitely, not the case for the khoi san)

Humans did not evolve from apes, evolutionary theory claims we have a common ancestor with apes. So where you got it from that we lost most of our smell and nocturnal hearing I have no idea, considering we dont know what attributes the common ancestor held. Do you wish to elaborate?

Some things are obvious 1). I believe I had read about our diminished senses and increased intelligence (maybe Konrad Lorenz?) but in any case it can be deduced using logic alone that our common ancestor was just another simian, not a very particular or distinct one. All simians have a good sense of smell (compared to us homo sapiens sapiens), and they all have to be alerted of danger while they sleep - most land animals do.

1)e.g. People also come taller (depends hugely on diet), less hairy and in some cases with less teeth every generation, it's folk knowledge, but only validated after Darwin's theory was formulated, and eventually corroborated.

In any case I find the possible ramifications of this discoveries quiet interesting, even disquieting. Wolf and dogs are pack animals, maybe more individualistic than apes, but not a lot more.

Humans can easily master that pack dynamic and adapt it to dogs (as in successful domestication, what the dog whisperer teaches) and even to wolves (

). The Historical Civilization we members of Objectivism Online consider the greatest of all, according to recent polls, is even symbolized by the reverse situation, a she-wolf 'domesticating'/raising feral humans constitutes the basis of its founding myth. (and the she wolf also displays the most 'humanistic' attributes of all the characters, since she feeds the little humans that would grow up to develop homicidal rivalry). The conclusion would be that 1) pack behaviour defined certain human traits related to the organization of power which are by now deeply ingrained, and 2) that we owe our success as a species as much to reason (which Neaderthals shared) as to pack behaviour and fidelity which allowed us to exterminate the only other species on Earth that also had more brains than brow.

So that is the ambivalent nature of our relationship to dogs. Rationally, we could even eat them, and at least two prominent peoples, Cantonese and Koreans, do. Most Europeans consider eating dog highly taboo, and in history dog eating appears only at the last stages of a long siege.

Cantonese and Koreans never had to compete for territory with Neanderthals

East Asians are also in average less hairy and, everything would indicate, more intelligent. Do they also have less teeth/more cases of tooth agenesis?

Could Neanderthals have been more intelligent but never had a chance because dog aided brow, beats brain?

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What's this about jackals and coyotes? Jackals and coyotes have nothing to do with dogs. Dogs are domesticated wolves.

which allowed us to exterminate the only other species on Earth that also had more brains than brow
Say what? Exterminate? Why are you assuming that Neanderthals were exterminated? I have never seen so much as an inkling of evidence for that.
Are we so homogeneous to the point that our closest biological cousin used to be the neanderthal which is either extinct or absorbed into the European and Basque population?
Or none of the above.

Archeological evidence suggests no inter-breeding between homo sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe. There is genetic evidence of interbreeding much earlier than that, in the Middle East, before modern humans spread to Asia and Europe (both Caucasians and Asians have between 1% and 4% of Neanderthal DNA, and Sub-Saharan Africans have none)

Edited by Nicky
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How do you determine less hairy?

why wouldn't one logical conclusion be that there are simply more humans alive and the less than hairy gene or gene attribute just has a statistically higher probability of being expressed. Or is there a theory that explains gene mutation in response to environmental causes?

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'Tad, I never said it was better, I said it was more determined by diet than other genetic predispositions. but as Gramlich correctly pointed out: this is 'ALL' speculation.

In any case, one can formulate and approach the problem in many different ways, many a ways that don't indirectly insult tall, short, hairy people hairless people, Koreans or Basques, and one would still have the same problem:

we have ( I do, and one out of two human beings I know, does) an almost irrational affection for dogs. Actually, outright irrational unless we explain why we still keep and revere dogs in the city.

This year it has been 'discovered' that we share a relatively big sclera for our bodies, and that we are able to communicate by movements of the pupil. just linking the article in my previous post.

let's continue this discussion in 2013/4.

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What's this about jackals and coyotes? Jackals and coyotes have nothing to do with dogs. Dogs are domesticated wolves. Say what? Exterminate? Why are you assuming that Neanderthals were exterminated? I have never seen so much as an inkling of evidence for that.Or none of the above.

Archeological evidence suggests no inter-breeding between homo sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe. There is genetic evidence of interbreeding much earlier than that, in the Middle East, before modern humans spread to Asia and Europe (both Caucasians and Asians have between 1% and 4% of Neanderthal DNA, and Sub-Saharan Africans have none)

Yes, or none of the above. (However I don't see how a species disappears without being either wiped out or absorbed into a new one..)

About those figures, they are more or less correct as far as we know. But the Neanderthals were able to conquer a limited geographic area that corresponds to Northern Africa, the West Asian land bridges and the European peninsulas. There is little doubt that humans and Neanderthals lived at the same time and most likely had to compete for territory, abeit that particular territory that holds certain cultural and historic, even prehistoric significance to us modern humans.

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