Our dogs' diversity can be traced back to the Stone Age

> Tamer wolves would get more food, and the humans gradually came to rely on the wolves to clean up remains of messy carcasses and to raise the alarm if a predator came near.

I read a book on the history of dogs https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40180044-once-a-wolf

The only thing I remember is he said dogs may have stuck around humans because, like wolves today do with others predators, they could follow them around and scavenge off their successful hunts. But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals. Wolves are very capable at finding their own food but they enjoyed some meat & bones thrown to them in between their daily rounds. That's what crossed the line between scavenging on the outside and a closer relationship.

> But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals.

My pet theory is that humans captured wolf pups, possibly by dealing with parents first, and kept them around as pets. People love playing with tiger, bear, and wolf pups and keeping them as pets today.

They may have but that's a way to get a (maybe) tame wolf, not a domesticated dog.

It would take generations of breeding the tamest ones, with the behaviors you wanted, to get something like the beginnings of domesticated dogs.

did you ever hear the story about the Russian researcher who bred foxes into domestic pets within only about a dozen and a half dozen rounds of keeping only the "cutest" pups?

". Within just 15 generations of selective breeding, the experiment had yielded foxes that could live with people."

I read somewhere, that it might not have been a process, but a unique event. Dogs are not just gradually tamed wolves, but domestication might have been started with a genetic defect that made them tame.

Not sure man. The closest relative to the dog is the likely extinct, Japanese Wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wolf

Maybe they were very tame to begin with? Like the extinct Falkland wolf:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_wolf

"There were no forests for the animal to hide in, and it had no fear of humans;[citation needed] it was possible to lure the animal with a chunk of meat held in one hand, and kill it with a knife held in the other"

They were already starting with foxes that were being farmed for their fur, not completely wild ones, IIRC.

Someone once tried to hire me, on one of the islands up the Northern coast of BC.

Took 3 hours to get to by ferry, and one of the enticements was that "we have these dwarf deer, and they have no fear of man. You just walk up to them and hit them on the head with a stick".

I presume there was nothing larger than a fox on that island, for a deer to have no fear.

That would create a genetic bottleneck of one, which should shine like a beacon in the DNA studies. We already know Homo sapiens had a bottleneck of thousands at one point.

It also makes me wonder about the longlasting question of speciation. If it happens suddenly, shouldn't that indicate a singular (or near-singular) instance of mutation?

They also started wagging tails.

https://archive.is/gKO4z