The short answer is, no, of course, little Fluffy is not a big, wild wolf. When you go to sleep at night, you might worry that Fluffy will snore or steal the blankets, but you never worry about her eating you as a midnight snack. As far as behavior is concerned, dogs and wolves are quite different. While both dogs and wolves are members of the Canis lupus species, scientists speculate that between 15,000 to 40,000 years ago, some wolves began evolving into dogs. And what drives evolution? Survival.

Survival of a species depends on many factors, but one of the most basic needs for survival is sustenance. Wolves, as a species, spend most of their time finding and exploiting food sources, and this is what anthropologists believe drove some wolves toward their slow evolution into dogs. Being a hunter is hard work. A lone wolf is not an apex hunter and to be successful, will normally hunt in a family pack. When a kill is made, the Alpha male and female will eat the choicest bits while the lower hierarchy wolves eat the leftovers. When the pack is successful, wolves gorge, eating up to 10 to 20 pounds at the kill site and then often not having another kill for many days.  Gorging alternating with fasting is the norm for wolves, and this eating pattern is stressful on the body and not particularly energy efficient. Optimum nutrition requires a steady supply of appropriate food, creating healthy animals with increased reproductive outcomes.  For wolves, hunting is time-intensive, hard physical labor requiring cohorts and not necessarily resulting in top-grade nutrition for lower-status wolves. However, being a scavenger requires far less physical effort and can be done alone with no sharing of the resource.

Eons ago, when growing human populations began living in farming -type settlements, one very significant thing happened affecting our relationship with wolves. Human communities always need garbage dumps, and garbage dumps proved to be a reliable, steady source of food for braver wolves. When two different species interact over a period of time, they form what scientists call a symbiotic relationship. In the beginning, wolves were simply filching human waste and disappearing. The human-wolf relationship was marginal, with one species (wolves) benefiting and the other species (humans) neither harmed nor helped. But over the course of thousands of years, braver wolves became more comfortable at the dump site, eating a more reliable diet and becoming more dependent upon their human–provided food source. They learned to co-exist around humans for access to the garbage humans inevitably produce. This was the period of divergence between shyer wolves who remained wolves and bolder wolves who evolved into proto-dogs. Eventually, each group occupied completely separate niches. Shy wolves remained in the wild, continuing their instinctive behaviors, while bolder wolves evolved into proto-dogs through developing necessary behavioral skills to facilitate their integration into human society.

During this slow period of transition, as wolves gradually lost their fear of humans, they became helpful by barking at intruding enemies, thus warning the settlers of danger to their flocks and themselves. Of course, the wolves were also protecting their steady food source, the refuse area. As the human/wolf relationship moved into deeper levels of tolerance toward acceptance, the interactions became mutually beneficial to both species. Slowly but surely, wild wolves were gradually self-domesticating into tame proto-dogs.

Unlike wild cats, which are solitary hunters and have relatively low social skills, wolves had to develop social bonds to hunt effectively as a pack unit. This ability to understand social nuances between pack members sharpened wolves’ awareness of human behaviors. Wolves understand hierarchies; they recognize there are leaders and there are followers. As wolves evolving into proto-dogs eventually relinquished Alpha status to humans, their lives got immeasurably better. With lessening fear between the species, humans were able to approach and offer higher-value foods to these proto-dogs and also offer them shelter, two necessities for survival. Of course, it didn’t hurt that wolf pups are incredibly cute and playful, making them attractive to human children and adults alike.  This natural attraction and curiosity further stimulated interactions between the two species. With the proto dogs increased reproductive ability and closer proximity to humans, the wolf – proto dog – dog cycle was well on its way. Through many generations, impressionable pups came closer and closer to becoming Canis lupus familliaris…dogs.

At this time, the above scenario makes the most sense to scientists studying the evolution of dogs from wolves. We can see how the acquisition of a reliable new food source was able to change the behavior of a species (wolves) so it could adapt into a mutually beneficial relationship with another species (humans). But what about the wolves’ physical and biological adaptations? In Part 2, we will explore the importance of those changes and their significance to dogs and their pet parents.