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Asked by IzzyO on 25 Jun 2024.
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Kirsty Ross answered on 1 Jul 2024:
Researchers think it happened in two phases:
Phase one – wolves to primitive domesticated dogs
Phase two – selective breeding for specific purposes (herding, transport, pest control)Phase one started around 30,000 years ago. Phase two was between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago, as farming started and dogs were needed for different reasons. Golden retrievers were developed in Scotland around 1860: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Retriever
Comments
Andrew M commented on :
The process can be amazingly short. There was / is a domestication experiment involing Silver foxes by Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut that’s been going on for around 60 years. Starting in 1959 they bred the 10% of their captive foxes that were the calmest and most social towards humans. In just 6 generations, that is 6 years, the foxes changed from being essentially wild to starting to act like pets (licking hands, liking being petted, appeared happy to see people etc.). As the generations have gone one they’ve even started to look like pets, retaining more of their juvenile features, becoming cuter. This was, of course, a very controlled and deliberate experiment, not a series of random events, which you would expect to take longer.
So whilst modern dog breeds have taken a long time to find and selectively breed up certain genetic mutations to give them their unique appearances and clearly distinguish them from wolves, the time needed for the domestication of the ancestral wolf-dog could have been amazingly short.