Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

Re: Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

Niall Taylor — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:38:44 GMT

[quote user="Evelyn Barbour-Hill"]Exactly. Showing that scientists should stick to reporting their findings, reaching conclusions based thereon and possibly offering further speculations from those conclusions while remaining within their area of expertise and while making it clear that their results merely suggest those speculations and do not indicate them as conclusions, and resist the temptation to offer colourful explanations to the broadcasting media related more to "popular science"than to science.

[/quote]

Fair point, the press are more interested in selling newspapers than getting the truth across.

The Washington Post headline was "Learning to love grains, potatoes was key to the evolution of dogs". Someone pointed out in comments that, since dogs reportedly evolved in the Old World, there would have been no potatoes around for them to adapt to!

Cheers,

Niall

Re: Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

Evelyn Barbour-Hill — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:46:55 GMT

Exactly. Showing that scientists should stick to reporting their findings, reaching conclusions based thereon and possibly offering further speculations from those conclusions while remaining within their area of expertise and while making it clear that their results merely suggest those speculations and do not indicate them as conclusions, and resist the temptation to offer colourful explanations to the broadcasting media related more to "popular science"than to science.

Re: Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

Niall Taylor — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:48:29 GMT

[quote user="Evelyn Barbour-Hill"]I doubt if Stone Age hunter-gatherers or early agriculturalists had anything remotely like "waste dumps". If there was any food value at all left in anything I bet it would be used. The evolution hypothesis fails.[/quote]

Never the less, and your expertise regarding human settlements during the paleolithic period notwithstanding, the domestic dog does seem to have more genes coded for the digestion of starch than the wolf, according to the authors of the paper referred to in the BBC article:

Axelsson, E., Ratnakumar, A., Arendt, M.,Maqbool, K., Webster, M.T., Perloski, M., Liberg, O., Arnemo, J.M., Hedhammar, A., Lindblad-Toh, K., (2013) The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet Nature doi:10.1038/nature11837

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11837.html

"The domestication of dogs was an important episode in the development of human civilization. The precise timing and location of this event is debated and little is known about the genetic changes that accompanied the transformation of ancient wolves into domestic dogs. Here we conduct whole-genome resequencing of dogs and wolves to identify 3.8 million genetic variants used to identify 36 genomic regions that probably represent targets for selection during dog domestication. Nineteen of these regions contain genes important in brain function, eight of which belong to nervous system development pathways and potentially underlie behavioural changes central to dog domestication. Ten genes with key roles in starch digestion and fat metabolism also show signals of selection. We identify candidate mutations in key genes and provide functional support for an increased starch digestion in dogs relative to wolves. Our results indicate that novel adaptations allowing the early ancestors of modern dogs to thrive on a diet rich in starch, relative to the carnivorous diet of wolves, constituted a crucial step in the early domestication of dogs."

Cheers,

Niall

Re: Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

Evelyn Barbour-Hill — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:55:02 GMT

I doubt if Stone Age hunter-gatherers or early agriculturalists had anything remotely like "waste dumps". If there was any food value at all left in anything I bet it would be used. The evolution hypothesis fails.

Re: Dog evolved 'on the waste dump'

Niall Taylor — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:54:25 GMT

Interesting article, thanks Emma.

There's a very elegant "thought piece" about dogs and other animals and plants having evolved in the "human niche", so much so, that we and dogs, cows, reindeer, wheat, barley, oats etc have all become co-dependant species in the same way that other species living in a specialist ecological niche have (eg the coral reef etc...).

See:

Bleed, P., (2006) Living in the Human Niche Evolutionary Anthropology Vol. 15 pp. 8 -10

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/evan.20084/pdf

"Based on an intuitively apparent fit between dogs and human hunters, analysts have painted the relationship between dogs and people as a successful co-evolution. They point to conditions of late Pleistocene life that would have drawn humans and ancestral dogs into contact and behavioral patterns that would have encouraged life together. It seems clear that conditions of canid life may have made it easy for wolves, especially more "tamable" individuals, to fit into Upper Paleolithic ways of life and into hunting bands."

Cheers,

Niall