Domestication and Evolution in Dogs: Current Issues and Questions That Remain

The evolution and domestication of dogs remains an elusive and controversial topic, particularly as burgeoning research in cognition and behavior in dogs has emerged recently. While there is little question that wolves were the ancestors of the domestic dog, the role that early hominid socialization and proximity to ancestral wolves played in domestication of dogs raises a number of important questions. While there has been past speculation that scrounging of food waste may have been a primary source for close encounters with less fearful wolves and/or their young pups, known as the commensal scavenger hypothesis, there has been recent speculation that suggests another avenue for domestication. The second hypothesis is known as pet keeping or cross-species hypothesis, and posits that, based on recent observations of pet keeping in current hunter-gatherers, that early hominids also adopted wolf pups, resulting in a cooperative social system between humans and dogs. These two perspectives represent very distinctly different theoretical narratives, with separate underlying assumptions, both about wolves and humans, and the various types of relationships that may have existed and contributed to the domestication of dogs. This proposed Research Topic will further explore the issues and questions surrounding these very different hypotheses.

The Research Topic will accept all types of papers, with the exception of book reviews. Authors may explore both sides of the hypothetical arguments or promote one perspective over the other. Themes to be explored will include the evolution and domestication of modern canines, co-evolution and domestication mechanisms and processes between dogs and humans, current models of dog domestication and extant observations that contribute to these models, genetic evidence in support of different hypotheses of domestication in dogs, and other tangential topics that bear directly on the Research Topic.