“The direct or indirect human artificial selection process made the dog bark as we know,” said Csaba Molnar, formerly an ethologist at Hungary’s Eotvos Lorand University.
Molnar’s work was inspired by a simple but intriguing fact: Barking is common in domesticated dogs, but infrequent if not downright absent in their wild counterparts. Wild dogs yip and squeal and whine, but rarely produce the repetitive acoustic percussion that is barking. Many people had made that observation, but Molnar and his colleagues were the first to rigorously investigate it.
Because anatomical differences between wild and domestic dogs don’t explain the barking gap, Molnar hypothesized a link to their one great difference: Domesticated dogs have spent the last 50,000 years in human company, being intensively bred to fit our requirements.
Evolution over such a relatively short time is difficult to pin down, but Molnar reasoned that if his hypothesis were correct, two facts would need to be true: Barks should contain information about dogs’ internal states or external environment, and humans should be able to interpret them.
To people who know dogs well, this might seem self-evident. But not every intuition is true. As Molnar’s research would show, sheepherders — people understandably certain in their ability to recognize their own own dogs’ voices — actually couldn’t distinguish their dogs’ barks from others.- More Here
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