The Way to a Wolf’s Heart
How did ancient wild wolves transform into man’s best friend?
Leftovers, says a new study.
Sometime between 29,000 and 14,000 years ago, Eurasian inhabitants had to survive the freezing wastelands by hunting.
The problem was that their prey was lean and would have provided more proteins than humans could have safely consumed. The human body can’t survive on a purely carnivorous diet because of the liver’s ability to generate only part of our energy needs from protein.
In their paper, researchers wrote that ancient humans only acquired 45 percent of their calories from animal protein. They added that since hunter-gatherers couldn’t eat all the lean meat, they would leave some for the wolf pups that were being raised by humans as pets, Science News reported.
The team believes that through time, competition between wolves and humans for prey declined as the canines started becoming more docile.
Eventually, the future generations of well-treated and well-fed pet wolves evolved into today’s dogs.
“…the dogs would have become docile, being utilized in a multitude of ways such as hunting companions, beasts of burden and guards as well as going through many similar evolutionary changes as humans,” the study’s authors wrote.
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