It's a complete skull with both of the lower jaws. Most of the teeth are there. The skull was found in a cave in Siberia, in the Altai Mountains, in about 1975. The Altai Mountains are in, sort of, southern Siberia. If you look on a map, it's where the confluence of Mongolia, Siberia and Afghanistan, just to sort of place it.
And the original archaeologist who found the specimen thought that it really didn't look like a typical wolf, and so he pulled it out for some re-analysis. And that's what we've been doing now, is going back and doing - did some radiocarbon dating to put it in proper chronological context, and also looked at measuring it and that sort of thing to see how it compared to both more recent dogs and also to wolves of that time period.
And the original archaeologist who found the specimen thought that it really didn't look like a typical wolf, and so he pulled it out for some re-analysis. And that's what we've been doing now, is going back and doing - did some radiocarbon dating to put it in proper chronological context, and also looked at measuring it and that sort of thing to see how it compared to both more recent dogs and also to wolves of that time period.
And so is there still this big gap between 12,000 and 33,000 years of knowledge of what happened there?
Yes. There are several more specimens similar to this one that we found that were found in Belgium, the Czech Republic and around the Caucasus in Southern Europe and - that are similar to this and about the same - from the same time period. But still this big gap.
We've been told over the years that the common belief about how dogs were domesticated is that ancient people tamed wolf pups. They tamed them and created them, brought them in, and they morphed into dogs, so to speak. Does this back that up, or is there a better theory?
We've been told over the years that the common belief about how dogs were domesticated is that ancient people tamed wolf pups. They tamed them and created them, brought them in, and they morphed into dogs, so to speak. Does this back that up, or is there a better theory?
Well, I would say not. One of the things that has come to light is that - that idea that taming actually leads to the changes we see between wolves and dogs really has no evidence to back it up. It doesn't mean that it couldn't have happened. It just means that, really, there are - is no evidence to suppose that that's true. So what anthropologists and biologists have been looking at is what kind of process might be a better explanation for how that transition would have occurred.
And what we're coming up with is the idea that actually the wolves domesticated themselves, that when people settled down into permanent villages that some wolves chose to come and live with those people, and as a result of that colonization of the new habitat, that they naturally became this new species that we call a dog.- Rest of the interview with evolutionary biologist Susan Crockford Here
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