dogs on humans. They teach some how to sing.
Other dog-culture achievements:
Dogging- (UK) public sex- cuz dogs ain't got motels,
doggy style- boinking like a dog,
fuckin' the dog- (North Am) being lazy
But more importantly, the relationship between dogs
and humans is complex but telling as regards how
dogs and humans developed.
I read a book called Rogue Primate which, if I remember
said that dogs showed humans how to survive in social
groups.
You know that animals tend to like a territory to themselves.
and we've always thought that humans have developed the
sense of being able to cancel the perceived threat of your
neighbours, so that you can survive in sanity.
You know that , from time to time, you're sick of all the
noise and people around, right? Well, that's the basic
need for a lack of threats. People need to be sized up
as to their threat to you, or ignored, so that you don't
go nuts, and pull knives on people.
We thought that dogs showed us how to live in packs
and cooperate. BUTT, new research from China, on
the genetic level, has shown how wolves hung around,
near human societies, benefiting from their garbage,
and changing slowly into dogs. It has to do with
serotonin which says so much for drug use in modern
society (leave that for another story).
anyway, checkit: Stowe
boyd
Did
We Domesticate Ourselves, Like We Did With Dogs?
Carl
Zimmer reported recently on some interesting genetic research on dogs that tells us a great deal about their
divergence from wolves, but also
reflects back on the social mind of people.
Carl
Zimmer, From Fearsome Predator to Man’s Best Friend
As
they [Ya-Ping Zhang and others] reported on Tuesday [14 May 2013] in the
journal Nature Communications, they found that the split started 32,000 years ago. Those early
dogs would have encountered small bands of hunter-gatherers. People didn’t
settle in villages to farm
in East Asia until about 10,000 years ago.
After
dogs split from wolves, their genes
began to evolve in a new direction. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues were able
to identify some of these evolving genes. A number of them, it turned out, are active in dog brains. (Dr. Zhang and
some of his colleagues published some of these results last week in the journal
Molecular Biology and Evolution.)
Some of the genes that evolved early in dog
evolution are involved in smell or
hearing. Others are active in a region called the prefrontal cortex, where
mammals make decisions about how to behave. Some genes are involved in growing
connections between neurons. One
gene, called SLC6A4, transports a neurotransmitter called serotonin into
neurons.
The results offer some tantalizing hints about
how wolves first turned doglike. “The conventional view is that the
hunter-gatherers go out and get a puppy,” said Chung-I Wu of the University of
Chicago, an author of the Nature Communications study. If humans actually did breed early dogs this way, then dogs would
have descended from a very small population.
That’s not what Dr. Wu and his colleagues have
found, though. Instead, it appears that a large
population of wolves started lingering around humans — perhaps scavenging
the carcasses that hunters left
behind.
In this situation, aggressive wolves would have fared badly, because humans would kill
them off. Mellower wolves, by contrast, would thrive. If this notion turns out
to be true, it means that we didn’t
domesticate wolves — they domesticated themselves. SLC6A4 may have played a
crucial part in this change, because serotonin
influences aggression.
To test these ideas, Dr. Zhang and his
colleagues are gathering DNA from more dogs and wolves. They also hope to
collaborate with cognitive scientists to see how variants of genes like SLC6A4
affect the behavior of dogs today. Their results may also help explain human
evolution, because Dr. Zhang and his colleagues found that some of the same
genes that evolved in dog brains, such as SLC6A4, also experienced natural selection in human brains.
“Humans have had to tame themselves,” said Adam Boyko of Cornell University, one of Dr.
Zhang’s collaborators on the Molecular Biology and Evolution study. “The process
is probably similar to dogs — you have to tolerate
the presence of others.”
Turns out that the Clan of the Cave Bear
theory is wrong. We didn’t nab a mating pair of wolves and domesticate them.
Instead, lots of dogs — large packs
— hung around with hunter gathers, who gradually culled the more aggressive
members of the packs, leaving those that were more docile and pretty soon, those that fared best were those more willing
to cooperate with humans. After a short time, the proto-dogs are learning
to behave, and perhaps being rewarded by squirts
of serotonin in the brain when interacting with humans. This chemical leads to binding and
trust when present in human brains.
The second part of the story also comes from
Zimmer. Following the release of Ya-Ping Zhang’s paper, other researcher
noticed that some of the genes being tracked in the study are related to
serotonin production, but also on the list is MET, which is linked to cancers,
but that’s not all.
…
So, then, we have found that the same genes are linked to the foundation of human and canine sociability, although
human sociability evolved earlier. But, perhaps there is a tantalizing
glimpse of the evolution of how the social mind evolved in people, based on
looking at what apparently happened with dogs. One group — nearly modern human
hunter-gatherers — was decidedly social, and encounters a relatively non-social
species — wolves — who began to wander with them, eating their leavings. The
interaction leads to the wolves becoming dogs, because the humans kill the meanest canines, and exert an evolutionary pressure
that selects for human-style sociality.
Imagine two hundred thousand years earlier,
when one small band of early humans shared
a collection of gene mutations, leading to enhanced sociality, like MET,
SLC6A4, and others. (Note that this also led to a higher incidence of autism and cancer, as side effects.) Imagine
that other, less social hominins might have trailed those early humans around,
and the social humans might have exerted the same evolutionary pressures that
we later directed on canines. We may have domesticated ourselves into being
human, into being social. And maybe we aren’t finished yet.
