Where Do Dogs Come From?

From the tall Great Dane to the tiny Chihuahua, us humans are used to being around dogs of all shapes and sizes. We’re so used to it, in fact, that we forget that humans more-or-less created dogs…. And how we did it is a question that still stumps scientists to this day. So, where do dogs come from? Let’s take a look.

Before we answer the question, “where do dogs come from,” let’s look at what dogs are

We bet you’ve wondered: “Where do dogs come from, in the first place?” Photography ©Aimes Element | Thinkstock.

While scientists don’t know exactly how and when and where dogs came from, we do know what dogs are. They are the species Canis lupus familiaris, a member or subspecies of the family Canis lupus. Other species in the Canis lupus include wolves, coyotes and dingoes, and they all share a common wolf-like ancestor.

Here is where things get tricky. Scientists aren’t sure exactly where the wolf-like ancestor that formed the modern dog came from. The general consensus is they came from Europe, but there has been recent evidence to suggest that dogs may also have originated in Asia, too. However, scientists largely agree on one thing: Around 9,000 to 34,000 years ago, our human ancestors met our dogs’ wolf-like ancestors, and started a relationship between our species that continues to this day. Even though that wolf-like ancestor is long extinct, its legacy lives on in the dogs we know today.

The evolution of dogs

Scientists are still trying to figure out where our dogs’ wolf-like ancestor originated from (either Europe or Asia, or both), but a recent study shows that all modern dogs might come from 23 ancestral dog clades. Over time, through interbreeding between the groups, dogs developed into the breeds we see today.

Science Magazine reports that, “The clades […] bring together dogs with similar traits: Thus, Boxers, Bulldogs, and Boston Terriers — all bred for strength — fall into one clade; whereas herders like Sheepdogs, Corgis and Collies fall into another; and hunters like Retrievers, Spaniels and Setters fall into a third.” Later on, the piece adds, “The data [shows] how some breeds helped create others, as they share DNA with multiple clades.”

In conclusion, according to Science Magazine, “The grouping of different breeds that share particular jobs suggests that ancient breeders likely bred dogs for specific purposes, choosing to care for those that were best at guarding or herding. Then, in the past 200 years, people subdivided those larger groups into breeds.”

What breeds were ancient dogs?

The Alaskan Malamute is an ancient dog breed. Photography by Darina Matasova/Shutterstock.

So, what were the first dog breeds? Research varies, according to the Dogster article, Extinct, Primitive or Ancient: Which Are the Oldest Dog Breeds? The general consensus is that the following are the most ancient dog breeds:

Afghan Hound, a breed that originated in the Middle East
Akita, a breed that originated in Japan
Alaskan Malamute, a breed that originated in North America
Basenji, a breed that originated in ancient Egypt
Chinese Shar-Pei, a breed that originated in southern China
Chow Chow, a breed that originated in northern China
Saluki, a breed that originated in Egypt, and may be the oldest dog breed
Samoyed, a breed that originated in Siberia
Siberian Husky, a breed that originated in northeast Asia

The most popular dog breeds today

Given that we’ve had dogs around for 9,000 to 30,000 years, is it safe to say that they’ve always been the most popular pets? While popular pets have changed over the millennia, nowadays, there are always top contenders for the most popular dog breeds. The American Kennel Club (AKC) releases the most popular dog breed rankings every year, with Labrador Retrievers and German Shepherd Dogs taking the top slots.

In the United Kingdom, Labrador Retrievers and Cocker Spaniels are the most popular dogs, followed closely by French Bulldogs. In China, according to eChinaSites.com, Siberian Huskies and Labrador Retrievers top the list.

While there are no official stats from other countries, in 2014, an app called Klooff did a survey of the top dogs around the world, based on posts from their users. They created an infographic, which Business Insider reported on.

No matter where dogs come from, they’re a unique species

Dogs are a unique species, and the traits that make them unique may be the direct result of their relationship with humans. It cannot be overstated how much mankind’s influence shaped the dogs we know and love today, and made them so different from other canines and other animals.

Here are the many ways dogs are unique:

1. Domestication:

Earlier, I said that we created dogs, which is an oversimplification of a complex process that scientists are still trying to figure out. Without a doubt though, we had an impact on where dogs came from and their evolution through a process called domestication. The theory is that a group of friendly wolves started interacting with our ancestors — though whether those ancestors were hunter-gatherers or the first agrarian people is still up for debate.

Either way, these wolves self-domesticated themselves by starting to interact with us and then we did the rest by breeding for the traits we liked best. That produced various breeds of dogs, some that still exist today largely unchanged, some that went extinct and some that we started to domesticate but didn’t fully complete the process, for example, dingoes. (More on dingoes later.) We’re still creating new breeds of dogs even to this day — in fact, four new breeds were just recognized by the American Kennel Club (AKC).

2. Hypersociabilty:

It’s sometimes hard to believe that all the dogs we know and love today came from one or two populations of friendly wolves. But what made the wolf-like ancestor of our dogs so friendly to us? A recent study suggests that they might have had a variant in their genome that causes Williams-Beuren Syndrome (WBS) in humans.

WBS in people makes them hypersociable — for example, they are extremely friendly, outgoing and trusting. In dogs, this genetic variation might have led to the behaviors we associate with dogs today: overall friendliness, the way they love to interact with us and the fact that they make eye contact with us.

3. Using Facial Expressions to Communicate:

Humans are somewhat unique in that we use facial expressions to communicate, along with language. Most animals don’t, and any expressions they make are involuntary and inactive means of communication.

Except for dogs, of course, according to a recent study. Dogs actively use facial expressions to communicate with us, too. In a press release, lead researcher Dr. Juliane Kaminski of the University of Portsmouth says, “The findings appear to support evidence [that] dogs are sensitive to humans’ attentions and that expressions are potentially active attempts to communicate, not simple emotional displays.”

4. Eye Contact:

No other canine likes making eye contact with us quite like dogs. And dogs do it to the extreme: Not only do they look to us for directions and information, but they also seem to just like staring into our eyes. This is another aspect of the gene variant that causes WBS in humans that was found in dogs. In fact, dogs evolving to regularly make eye contact with us may provide the most clues on how we domesticated dogs.

Can dingoes provide more clues to the question, “where do dogs come from?”

How and when we domesticated dogs is still largely unknown, but a recent study of dingoes might provide some more insight. As mentioned above, dingoes are a species of canine we started to domesticate, but when they were introduced to Australia, domestication stopped.

However, because ancient humans started to domesticate dingoes, it gives us a snapshot into the early domestication of dogs, according to Angie Johnston, Ph.D. student in Psychology at Yale University and lead researcher of the study, “Uncovering the origins of dog —human eye contact: dingoes establish eye contact more than wolves, but less than dogs.” The study revealed that dingoes do something that wolves don’t really do and dogs do all the time: Make eye contact.

“Previous work shows us that when you compare dogs and wolves, dogs are more likely to make eye contact with people,” Dr. Johnston says. “Eye contact is important for two species communicating with each other, but also for bonding and attachment. With dingoes, we found that they are more likely to make eye contact with humans than wolves were.”

According to the researchers, these findings suggest that dogs may have developed the motivation to make eye contact with people early in their domestication, but only developed the desire to maintain this contact later in their evolution.

“It might have been beneficial for the wolf-like ancestor of dogs and dingoes to make eye contact with humans in order to get food or similar,” Dr. Johnston says. Whatever the reason, this made such an impact on dog evolution that dingoes haven’t stopped making eye contact with humans, even after thousands of years as wild dogs. Because of that, dingoes might be the missing link in how wolves became dogs.

“Dingoes represent the kind of intermediate point of domestication,” Dr. Johnston says. “By comparing dogs and dingoes, it shows us what might have been influencing the changes we see over domestication.”

Thumbnail: Photography by Sergieiev/Shutterstock.

Read more about dogs in history on Dogster.com:

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Dogs Smell Human Fear and Mirror Our Mood When They Do

A dog’s nose knows.

A dog’s nose is a work of art, an organ that’s evolved to be an incredibly sensitive to a wide variety of odors. Dogs put their noses in all sorts of places, many of which we find disgusting or offensive but that’s what it’s like to be a dog and we have to accept that’s how they sense their world. Not allowing dogs to sniff can be seen as a form of sensory deprivation that robs them of vital information they need to navigate their surroundings including odors from the mouth, ears, and other areas of the body including those very special private parts of other dogs, other animals, humans, and yes, pee, poop, and a wide variety of stinky stuff they crave and savor and we find utterly revolting.

It always surprises me when I talk with people about dog behavior and what they think is well known and supported by scientific research. One phrase I often hear goes something like, “Dogs smell our moods, especially fear, and they too get leery and uneasy.” I catch myself sometimes saying this to people, but I realize that we don’t really “know” this from any sort of scientific research. However, a good deal of citizen science has clearly alerted me and others that this could be something real.

It’s always good when our intuitions are supported by research, and a new study conducted by Biagio D’Aniello and his colleagues published in the journal Animal Cognition called “Interspecies transmission of emotional information via chemosignals: from humans to dogs (Canis lupus familiaris)” confirms what many have “known,” namely that dogs do smell human fear using chemosignals and they too get scared. The original research report isn’t available online, but an apt summary and a complete list of references are provided.

Dr. D’Aniello and his team studied Golden retrievers and Labradors and were interested if human body odors, called chemosignals, produced in the armpits of happy and fearfulmale humans, could be detected by the dogs and how the different odors affected the dogs. During the experiment, the dog’s human (“owner”), a strange human, and an odor dispenser were present in a room where the dogs could move around freely. The three sweaty odors represented fear, happiness, and a control situation in which there was no sweat. The researchers studied how the dogs interacted with their owner, the stranger, and the sweat dispenser and monitored the dog’s heart rate.

Their results can be summarized as follows: “There were fewer and shorter owner directed behaviors and stranger directed behaviors when they were in the ‘happy odor condition’ compared to the fear odor and control conditions. In the fear odor condition, they displayed more stressful behaviors. The heart rate data in the control and happy conditions were significantly lower than in the fear condition. Our findings suggest that interspecies emotional communication is facilitated by chemosignals.”

I hope that the complete research paper will soon be available online, but a very useful summary of this research project is provided by Jake Buehler in an essay published in New Scientist titled “Dogs really can smell your fear, and then they get scared too.” He writes, “Dogs exposed to fear smells showed more signs of stress than those exposed to happy or neutral smells. They also had higher heart rates, and sought more reassurance from their owners and made less social contact with strangers.”

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Genetic study uncovers evolutionary history of dingoes

A major study of dingo DNA has revealed dingoes most likely migrated to Australia in two separate waves via a former land bridge with Papua New Guinea. The find has significant implications for conservation, with researchers recommending the two genetically distinct populations of dingoes be treated as different groups for management and conservation purposes.

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From Fearful to Fear Free: Book Review

From Fearful to Fear Free is a breath of fresh air. It’s a new book by Dr. Marty Becker, DVM et. al. and available exclusively from Dogwise. The book was motivated by the lead author’s insight after listening to a talk given by Dr. Karen Overall. She discussed the damage being done in veterinary clinics by dogs who were terrified, if not traumatized, by veterinary procedures. Dr. Becker left the talk shaken to the core. As much as he loves dogs, and as experienced as he was as “American Veterinarian” on Good Morning America for 19 years, he had never thought about how much damage standard medical procedures can do to the health of the dogs who are frightened by them. Fear changes a dog’s physiology and how it presents in the clinic. It can suppress a dog’s immune system and exacerbate many medical issues. It can traumatize a dog such that his or her brain is changed significantly, and in some cases permanently.

I heard about the book, and Dr. Becker’s commitment to “Fear Free” during a delightful dinner with him, the night after his talk at the recent APDT conference in Richmond, VA. He’s a wonderful dinner companion, warm, friendly and exuberant in his passion to change the world of veterinary medicine to become “fear free.” But he’s not stopping there; his new book is written for the general public in hopes of convincing all dog owners to use positive reinforcement to eliminate as much fear and distress as we can from the life of a dog.

It’s a great book for the general public. (And it comes out everywhere next April, watch for it in the news.) It’s attractive and colorful, with lots of easily digestible information and stories. It actually had 4 authors: Dr. Becker, Dr. Lisa Rodesta and Dr. Wailani Sung, both board certified veterinary behaviorists, and Dr. Becker’s daughter, Mikkel Becker, CBCC-KA, CPDT-KA and a graduate of the Karen Pryor Academy and the San Francisco SPCA Academy. That’s a lot of hands-on-experience as well as academic knowledge–no wonder it’s a valuable addition to one’s library.

Do I agree with everything that’s in the book? Of course not. I barely agree with everything I’ve written once it’s published. But I would push back on the quote from Dr. Overall that says “Fear is the most damaging emotion a social species can experience. It causes permanent damage to the brain.” All fear is not equal, and being momentarily frightened by someone in a Halloween costume is not going to have the same effect as being attacked without warning at the dog park or years of abuse. I worry too a bit about the section on Socialization, that lists dozens of people, places and noises (among other things) to which to “socialize” your dog. In my experience, many people overdo “socialization” (the term many use for desensitizing at an early age). I see as many dogs overwhelmed by trips to the farmer’s market than helped by them.

But these concerns are easily countered by so much that is great about the book. There’s an excellent two-paragraph section on why punishment doesn’t work that will be far more effective than any explanation of the science behind positive punishment versus reinforcement. There’s actually an entire chapter on the power of positive reinforcement, including short stories from dogs the authors have worked with that help to make the point. (One of my favorites is actually about changing human behavior–a piece by Dr. Radosta about how her husband persuaded her to get on his motorcycle by finding the right reinforcement. Love it.)

One of my favorite chapters is “Visiting the Veterinarian”. This, after all, was the motivation for Dr. Becker’s Fear Free movement–making visits to the veterinarian less stressful by teaching veterinarians and clinic staff how to, as the website says, “Take the pet out of petrified”. Of course, Dr. Becker and colleagues are not the first to make this effort. I consider Dr. Sophia Yin’s work to be the gold standard, and her book Low Stress Handling has changed the lives of thousands of people and animals both. However, the more the better, and Dr. Becker, after 19 years on network television, has a broad and powerful reach. Good for him and his colleagues to make the most of it. Fear Free has already certified over 9,000 individuals in veterinary clinics around the country, so good on them. We need all the voices we can find to keep making the argument that so many of us have made for so many years… Physical force and intimidation might make some animals obedient some of the time, but it comes at too high a cost. Every addition to the work of organizations like The Association of Professional Dog Trainers and The Pet Professionals Guild is welcome indeed. Yeah for Dr. Becker and colleagues for adding their powerful voices to the chorus.

I’m curious: Have you ever talked to your veterinarian about force free or low stress handling? Do they have a copy of Dr. Yin’s book? Do they use those methods? Have they heard about Fear Free and considered being certified? I know my veterinarian will be open to it; we’ll talk about it next time I visit. You?

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Our return to seasonal weather was quite a shock, after basking in the 70’s for much of October. Much of our weekend was spent like squirrels getting ready for winter. No nuts were buried (although we keep tripping on the #%#^ walnuts…) but we got half of a lasagna garden done, I weeded and mulched one of my favorite gardens, “winterized” my closet by putting away T-shirts, and replaced them with turtle necks, and worked Maggie as much as was healthy. She’s a bit out of shape after her spay and our trip, so I am gradually increasing her work outs to ready her for two training clinics by Gordon Watt this week and later in November.

Next week I leave for New York City to give a talk to… can’t say. Honest. It’s a secret. I’m not allowed to say where or when I’m speaking until after I’ve given the talk. No kidding. I promise I’ll tell you as soon as I can. Yes, I hereby acknowledge that it is cruel to tease you, but you’ll notice I’m doing it anyway.

Here’s a photo of the first half of our new lasagna garden for the garden nerds out there,. It’s called a lasagna garden because its layers of “green and brown” material over cardboard, which cooks over the winter into rich, healthy soil. We’ve layered cardboard over clay soil full of weeds (cut to their base), then 3-year old mulch that’s become what I’d call “almost soil,” then 3-year old hay that is no good for the sheep anymore. Soon we’ll add on a few inches of aged manure from the sheep, then another layer of old hay and top it off with all the mulch I have left from the mulch pile (which is double shredded oak). Apologies to those of you who don’t garden for this blatantly boring photo.

The world is turning brown all around us. Not much color left anymore, which is why I am so grateful for these ridiculously hardy roses. Bless them.

I thought it only fitting to add a photograph of real life in the garden. As many do on social media, I usually show photographs of everything–dogs, cats, sheep, garden flowers–looking their best. But then, there’s reality. Here is the peony garden as I write this, which has lovely flowers every spring but succumbs eventually to a raft of disfiguring diseases. I’ll cut everything down as soon as I post this, throw the vegetation away and hope for next year. Truth in gardening. You saw it here.