Our dogs' diversity can be traced back to the Stone Age | Hacker News Reader

Our dogs' diversity can be traced back to the Stone Age

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The most successful land-based hunters are variants of dogs and cats [1]. (House cats remain in the top ten.)

Humans broke the game by allying with or exterminating other apex predators. I don’t believe another double-apex alliance is seen anywhere else, in our biosphere or in the fossil record.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_success

No, we broke the game by domestication, where we simplified hunting to walking the animal into the slaughterhouse. Mammalian wildlife is < 5% of mammalian biomass on earth, with humans being around 30% and domesticated animals being around 60% [1].

For example, there are around 30 billion chickens in the world, butchered within 6-8 weeks. Repeat.

Domestication was partly the result of not eliminating apex predators. A shepherd would guard a flock of sheep, and farmers would historically live/sleep near/with the animals, to protect them day and night.

[1] https://wildlife.org/on-a-global-scale-livestock-outweighs-w...

I think this is quite obviously a Yes And situation.

We've broken the game so many damn times, humans are awesome and we need to keep being awesome.

Somebodies gotta prevent an asteroid from killing the earth over these next 100 years.

It ain't gonna be the dolphins.

Speaking of which, we really need to ask the dolphins if they'd like some thumbs.

Interestingly, although giant asteroids have certainly been responsible for some of the mass extinctions we see in the fossil record, apparently super volcanoes are also right up there. And I don't think there is a damn thing we can do about them

> apparently super volcanoes are also right up there. And I don't think there is a damn thing we can do about them

I'm not sure about that.

Don't get me wrong, an example of a super-volcano is Yellowstone National Park, so I agree we can't prevent them

Rather, looking at the pandemic response and various wars, I think (most) world governments are competent enough to re-organise labour and national diets to mitigate the problems one would cause: covering farms in poly-tunnels, having "national service" that's about building/repurposing farming infrastructure rather than military function, food rationing, changes to farming laws to make sure livestock is only on land that doesn't support intensive crops, etc.

> an example of a super-volcano is Yellowstone National Park, so I agree we can't prevent them

We absolutely can, and extract geothermal energy from the system to boot.

Are you sure?

Everything I've seen suggests that the thermal mass of the Yellowstone magma reservoir is order-of 10km each way (so 1000km^3 total), density order-of 3 kg/litre, and heat capacity order-of 1500 J/kg K, so lowering the temperature of that reservoir by 100 K would still yield about the entire world's energy consumption in 2017: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1000km%5E3+*+3kg%2Fl+*+...

Even though this would combine both left-coded and right-coded aspects of the USA's politics (right: the USA's love of energy intensity; left: in this scenario it helps the environment not be made of fire), I find it dubious that the US would (or could) construct enough power plants to reach that scale.

(China might even want to help, but at this point I find myself too cynical of both China and the USA for that to happen even in an emergency).

If it involves eggs, I think we'll be fine, by the sheer number of them.

That's if we don't extinct ourselves (and the dolphins) first.

By becoming fatter and more delicious, the wild jungle fowl have evolved to exploit the human desire for a reliable source of meat. Now they outnumber us by a factor of four! The chickens have won.

> No, we broke the game by domestication

We domesticated plants animals for their meat, products and labour. We also domesticated dogs. This isn’t an either or.

Should be noted that wild cats (felis silvestris, felis lybica, felis catus) are not "apex" predators based on hunting success or being obligate carnivores. It's a common misconception that cats were apex predators when they were domesticated. They are both predator and prey, firmly in the middle of the food chain, and as such have the instincts of both. "Apex predator" would mean taking down large animals like elk, which would obviously be ridiculous for a small cat unless the prey is literally immobile.

Wolves are, though.

> Tamer wolves would get more food, and the humans gradually came to rely on the wolves to clean up remains of messy carcasses and to raise the alarm if a predator came near.

I read a book on the history of dogs https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40180044-once-a-wolf

The only thing I remember is he said dogs may have stuck around humans because, like wolves today do with others predators, they could follow them around and scavenge off their successful hunts. But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals. Wolves are very capable at finding their own food but they enjoyed some meat & bones thrown to them in between their daily rounds. That's what crossed the line between scavenging on the outside and a closer relationship.

> But it was also possible the wolves/dogs just really liked snacking in between meals.

My pet theory is that humans captured wolf pups, possibly by dealing with parents first, and kept them around as pets. People love playing with tiger, bear, and wolf pups and keeping them as pets today.

They may have but that's a way to get a (maybe) tame wolf, not a domesticated dog.

It would take generations of breeding the tamest ones, with the behaviors you wanted, to get something like the beginnings of domesticated dogs.

I read somewhere, that it might not have been a process, but a unique event. Dogs are not just gradually tamed wolves, but domestication might have been started with a genetic defect that made them tame.

That would create a genetic bottleneck of one, which should shine like a beacon in the DNA studies. We already know Homo sapiens had a bottleneck of thousands at one point.

It also makes me wonder about the longlasting question of speciation. If it happens suddenly, shouldn't that indicate a singular (or near-singular) instance of mutation?

did you ever hear the story about the Russian researcher who bred foxes into domestic pets within only about a dozen and a half dozen rounds of keeping only the "cutest" pups?

". Within just 15 generations of selective breeding, the experiment had yielded foxes that could live with people."

They were already starting with foxes that were being farmed for their fur, not completely wild ones, IIRC.

They also started wagging tails.

https://archive.is/gKO4z

Not sure man. The closest relative to the dog is the likely extinct, Japanese Wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wolf

Maybe they were very tame to begin with? Like the extinct Falkland wolf:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands_wolf

"There were no forests for the animal to hide in, and it had no fear of humans;[citation needed] it was possible to lure the animal with a chunk of meat held in one hand, and kill it with a knife held in the other"

Someone once tried to hire me, on one of the islands up the Northern coast of BC.

Took 3 hours to get to by ferry, and one of the enticements was that "we have these dwarf deer, and they have no fear of man. You just walk up to them and hit them on the head with a stick".

I presume there was nothing larger than a fox on that island, for a deer to have no fear.

What does this say about me... I read that as someone has a nuerodiverse dog

Huskies

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