Take a Chihuahua and a Great Dane and place them next to each other: the doubt that they don’t even belong to the same species could touch your mind. We tend to think that certain extreme differences between dogs are a relatively recent invention: that is, since we started creating more and more, and more and more “experimental” breeds.
In reality, diversification in canine morphology is much older than we thought: this is supported by a study published in Sciencewhich analyzes the differences between the skulls of hundreds of canids that have lived over the last 50,000 years, in an attempt to establish precisely when dogs stopped being wolves (or at least appearing as such) and became, in fact, dogs.
From wolves to dogs. We still don’t know precisely how long ago our ancestors domesticated the first dogs: we know that it happened in the last 40,000 years, and the most accepted recent hypotheses say that the place was Siberia and the date around 23,000 years ago. To be on the safe side, the University of Exeter team that conducted the study analyzed, by scanning them in 3D, the skulls of 643 canids that lived in the last 50,000 years.
The analysis produced a very clear result: up to 11,700 years ago, during the last ice age, the skulls of canids resembled those of wolves in every way. Then, about 11,000 years ago, the first characteristics associated with domestication began to appear in dogs: shorter muzzles, smaller teeth, more rounded skulls. To be precise, the first skull (among those analyzed) that corresponds to the description of a modern dog dates back to 10,800 years ago, and was found in Siberia.
Companions forever. After that first Russian skull, signs of domestication in dogs multiply around the world: in America, for example, the oldest dates back to around 8,500 years ago. Crossing the history of dogs with that of our ancestors, it is not surprising to discover that the turning point is 11,000 years ago: it is in this period that agriculture was born, and all human societies underwent a radical transformation.
The study shows that dogs have been an integral part of this transformation, in turn changed forever by domestication: each population had its own specific needs and their dogs (shepherd, hunting, sled…) reflect them. The result of this process is what we see today, with the extreme diversification of canine morphologies: it is a work that began thousands of years ago.
