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Co-Evolution: New evidence suggests that to be truly human is to be partly wolf.

Article Excerpt
A RECENT ADVANCE in scientific techniques has provided an unexpected insight into our ancient past, and a suggestion that our human heritage may not be totally derived from our primate ancestors.

Newly developed techniques of DNA analysis are helpful not only for solving crimes and learning about diseases, but also for assessing the genetic relationships between various species, and tracing their evolution from common ancestors. Most of this work has been based on comparisons of mitochondrial DNA, a specific form of genetic material that is inherited solely or largely from the mother. Mutations leave a tell-tale signature in the descendants of the female in which the mutation originally occurred. When a similar mutation is found in two species, it can be assumed that they descended from a common ancestor, and by making assumptions about the rate of such mutations, researchers can also estimate how long it has been since the two species split off from their common ancestor.

It was on the basis of such an analysis that Carles Vila and colleagues of the University of California at Los Angeles reported in 1997 that all domestic dogs were descended from the wolf, rather than from coyotes or other wild canids, as had been suggested for some breeds of dogs. In an article in the prestigious journal Science, they also calculated that the amount of genetic change in dogs indicated they had separated from wild wolves as much as 135,000 years ago. (1)

The biological separation of dogs from wolves is almost certainly associated with the domestication of dogs by humans. Canadian zoologist Susan Crock-ford views the process of domestication not as one of the simple capture and taming of wild animals, but one that involved a complex set of biological and behavioural changes based in hormone physiology, which accompanied the association of dogs with human groups. (2) It was this process that created the new species Canis familiaris.

Until the report of Vila, et al., archaeologists had been able to trace the domestication of dogs back only about 14,000 years, to the period immediately after the end of the last Ice Age and just before the invention of agriculture. Their evidence was not from the distinctive forms of skeleton that characterize the great variety of modern dogs, but from the deliberate burial of canids.

In both Eurasia and North America, archaeologists encountered instances of dogs that had been buried beneath the floors of huts or tent-camps, curled in sleeping postures, and covered with the red ochre that people of the time used in human burials, or in some cases interred directly with humans. (3) These buried canids...