Wolf-to-dog transition had little to do with humans, ancient skull suggests

A Canadian researcher who specializes in the biology of ancient dogs co-authored one of the most significant studies of the year in canine science: a paper detailing the world’s earliest evidence of an animal in transition from wild wolf to domesticated dog.

The “extraordinary preservation” of the creature’s 33,000-year-old skull — found in a cave in southern Siberia — has helped show that dog domestication “was, in most cases, entirely natural” and not really a “human accomplishment,” says B.C. evolutionary biologist Susan Crockford.

She was part of a six-member team of researchers from Russia, Britain, the U.S. and the Netherlands that turned the clock back on wolf-dog transformations by thousands of years and showed that the phenomenon probably happened many times in many places around the globe.

Crockford, co-author of the study published recently in the journal PLoS One, said the process of domestication began when wild packs of wolves — or even just a few individuals — began living at the fringes of human encampments and scavenging meals from piles of the discarded bones of human-hunted game.

She said lead researcher Nikolai Ovodov of the Russian Academy of Science “was immediately suspicious that there was something different” about the canine skull found in the Siberia’s Altai Mountains...

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