Fierce Wolf-Dogs May Have Given Homo Sapiens An Evolutionary Advantage :-) !!

Brilliant review of the new book The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction by Pat Shipman (confirmation bias sounds so sweet but yet the white sclera theory is something I experience everyday and it's true):

And if modern humans and wolves sound formidable individually, imagine how much more formidable they’d be if they worked together. That’s the heart of Shipman’s hypothesis: that Homo sapiens, roughly ten thousand years after arriving in Eurasia, stumbled onto a crucial adaptation that had eluded all other apex predators before them: making an alliance with another apex predator. Somehow, modern humans forged a symbiotic relationship with wolves that quickly led to a kind of wolf-dog that was no longer entirely wild. Homo sapiens had domesticated the competition.

Shipman theorizes that it was a feat Neanderthals couldn’t match. “Whatever abilities modern humans used to capture and apparently domesticate wolves into wolf-dogs,” she writes, “were either unknown to Neanderthals or beyond their capabilities.” She even offers an intriguing possibility for what Homo sapiens‘ x-factor might have been: the whites of their eyes! The idea being that the white sclera surrounding the modern human iris greatly facilitates gaze-directed silent hunting – an obvious advantage in tracking prey – and that it’s something certain kind of canids share to a greater degree than others (hence the centrality of bright-eyed wolf to the story rather than, say, omnipresent but black-eyed bush dog). Thus the tendency of modern dog-owners to stare meaningfully into their dogs’ upturned faces might be vital in explaining how either the dog-owner or the dog is here at all.

Modern humans, Shipman contends, in forming this kind of “unprecedented alliance with another species … created for ourselves an ability to borrow the traits of other species and use them to enhance our own survival in almost every habitat on the planet.” Wolves instinctively understood exactly the kind of hierarchical social structure humans already had, which made it that much easier for Homo sapiens to begin domesticating wolf-dogs and using them in ways present-day hunters will recognize: a pack of canines can detect prey long before humans can, and they can chase that prey farther and longer than humans can, and, crucially, they can keep that prey at bay and stationary until humans can arrive with their superior numbers and projectile weapons. The wolf-dogs would have realized in short order that in exchange for their instinctive distrust of hominins the arrangement would garner them more reliable kills. And the humans would have seen that the wolf-dogs were helping to secure more meat than they’d provide if they themselves were simply slaughtered. And so the 35,000-year-old partnership between humans and dogs began – in multiple genocides.