Ancient wolf DNA to show how predator became man's best friend

[Xithras]

12. I read a theory many years ago that made a LOT of sense.

There is a common, but incorrect, notion that all of our ancestors were migratory prior to the invention of agriculture. In truth, the migratory tendencies of any particular group of humans was highly dependent on the environment around them and the abundance of the surrounding forage and wildlife. There have been countless ancient settlement sites found, especially in or near caves, that appear to have been populated year round, long before agriculture was invented. We have found evidence of deliberately formed long term settlements dating from at least 40,000 years ago, and there have been a few discoveries suggesting that Homo Erectus may have been constructing very primitive settlements as long as 400,000 years ago. Hunter gatherers were often nomads, but not always. Even when they were, there were almost unquestionably instances where they would settle in one place for months or years at a time before moving on again.

Wolves are extremely territorial animals, and wolf packs usually have a territorial range far larger than they need for survival. Early humans living inside of these relatively stable settlements would have probably existed inside the range of a single pack. Early humans were just as intelligent and observant as we are, and would have quickly realized this. It's entirely probable that the early humans would have come to recognize (and, humans being humans, probably even name) individual pack members. The wolves in turn, being naturally curious and highly intelligent, would have quickly realized that humans were dangerous prey and would have probably ignored early humans the same way they largely ignore bears and badgers today. They recognized that humans COULD be eaten, but that doing so was very dangerous.

Here's where the theory gets interesting. The initial human reaction to wolves would be to exterminate them. The wolves are dangerous and are potential competition when hunting. However, wiping out wolves is a neverending process. Wipe out one pack, and another will move in. Wolves are always looking for new territory, and no pack is going to ignore a large swath of empty land. Those new packs were extremely dangerous, as they wouldn't have been adapted to humans and would have needed to "re-learn" the lesson about humans being risky prey.

It wouldn't have taken humans long to realize that it was better, in the long run, to simply make peace with the nearby wolves. The territoriality of the local wolf pack would have kept new packs away, and the local packs wariness around humans would have kept the humans safer after the first few contacts.

Eventually, three things would have happened.

1) Humans would have realized that wolf attacks are more common in the winter, when less food is available. This might have even led some of them to deliberately feed local wolves, knowing that a well-fed wolf is less of a threat. The wolves, being intelligent, would quickly recognized that humans were providing them food, and would have associated them with their "pack" (this same behavior has been seen in modern times when rural people feed wolves). By providing them with food, these small groups would have integrated themselves into the wolves social order.

2) Overly aggressive wolves would be culled from the pack by humans over time as they continued to be aggressive toward humans anyway. Because packs form a fairly closed breeding group, this would have naturally led to a reduction in aggressiveness in the packs immediately surrounding human encampments.

3) Non aggressive and prolonged contact between humans and wolves can lead to the two coexisting side by side without conflict in as little as a few weeks (many wildlife researchers have capitalized on this fact to get close to wild wolf packs). It's imaginable that, within a couple of years of a camps establishment, that wolves might have regularly approached human camps for prolonged periods of time. As new generations of humans and wolves grew up in an environment where they were both exposed to each other regularly from birth, much of the wariness between the two species would have waned.

The theory stated that this sequence of events was probably repeated countless times for millenia as humans and wolves lived alongside each other in a "mutually beneficial truce". It's probable that the first wolf pups raised by humans weren't part of a deliberate attempt to domesticate the animals, but was simply an attempt to help out the offspring of a deceased wolf that the villagers would have already been long familiar with. Once that bridge was crossed, and the wolves began living directly in the human villages, selective pressure would have rapidly domesticated them without any deliberate thought or planning by the humans.