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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

It's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs.

A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has human society in any way been affected by the structure of wolf packs? Did hairless monkeys form stronger tribes because of it?

I don't believe for a second that this deep interspecies friendship has been one-sided and hasn't brought psychological if not physical changes as much as the changes it's brought to wolves.

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This is where evolutionary theory can be viewed through the lens of coevolution or group selection (a group defined as containing both a selection of humans, and also animals and plants in varying degrees of domestication, as a whole system). This is in contrast to kin selection, which only accounts for genetic relatedness.

I remember in one of Jiang Xueqin's videos, he made the interesting argument that "grain domesticated humans" at least as much, if not more, than "humans domesticated grain".

Grains aren't very good food until bread is invented (probably from sprouted grains, originally). Seeds are designed to keep their goodness inside, and are very good at that containment. Bread in turn requires cooking. (I wonder now if there was a brief period of surviving on raw sprouted grains... which are far inferior because they mold so quickly.)

Wisdom teeth are far more valuable to a precooking human, who has to chew constantly to break down plant cells. The extra chewing causes stress that induces the jaw to grow longers, allowing space for the wisdome teeth.

We're basically at the "awkward teenage" part of evolving past raw-food diets.

Grass and other seeds were always stew ingredients https://phys.org/news/2022-11-real-paleo-diet-archaeological...

I think the "wheat domesticated humans" argument is about changes to our behavior, our culture and social structures, rather than genetic change. It isn't domestication in the evolutionary sense. It would be like keeping zebras on a farm with horses and doing your best to tame and train them. You might be able to change their behavior so that they behaved differently from wild zebras, but it wouldn't be domestication unless you bred them over generations to produce a population that was genetically different from wild zebras.

I read somewhere that he could have change human sleep. Human can have a deeper sleep knowing a guard will alert of danger.

Thankfully we have those other animals, "human puppies", to counteract this :P

I know it’s said in jest, but if your kid is attached while you’re sleeping, i.e. breastfeeding and cosleeping, which a hunter gatherer society would most certainly do, babies don’t fuss unless they’re sick or something. My wife slept soundly through the night and said “it’s amazing she doesn’t feed at night!” (Referring to our daughter), and I said, shocked, “she eats at night, she makes a soft noise and you just roll over and pop a boob in her mouth without waking up!” This is entirely a modern problem of our own creation and convenience.

On a long enough timeline it’s possible that cat-people and dog-people evolve separately into different species

I think some dog people already are a different species - hanging bags of dog shit on trees would never occur to me for example. I’d hate to see what their Christmas trees look like.

Huh? Who does that?

In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this. When confronted about leaving the bagged dog shit somewhere they always say they're going to pick it up on the way back, yet the next day it's still there.

Modern British dog owners are incredibly irresponsible surrounding how they look after their pets and how they handle the pets mess. Covid made it measurably worse.

> In the UK, it's incredibly common for dog owners to do this.

That's wild. I've never once seen this in the US.

Obviously there are people who just don't clean up after their dogs in the first place, but to clean it up and then hang the bagged crap on a tree? Haha.

They do it a lot. My garden backs onto a public woodland and I can confirm it happens. Last summer when I tidied up out the back of my house, I found at least five years worth of buried dog turds in bags. Cleaning it up was not fun. I used a backpack blower to blow it all into line of "turd shame" away from the houses.

It looks a lot nicer out there now and I gave the trees a little prune (I'm a qualified arborist) so people know this is a "tidy area" and so far no more turds in bags.

I've never seen it in a tree, but I do see some owners leaving their crap bags on hiking trails and often forgetting about them on the return trip. I'd rather they let the dog poop in the forest instead of encapsulating it in a plastic bag until a Good Samaritan picks it up.

In the US they don't hang it on trees, they just leave by the side of the trail or road or whatever. But it is very common to see bags of dogshit on the sidewalk or by the side of a trail in the US.

A lot of times, they just toss the bag on the ground.

Each morning, I take a 5K walk around the neighborhood, and am constantly passing cast-off shitbags.

They are usually brightly-colored, and are easy to spot.

I remember, once, being at a stop light, on a fairly major road, where a guy was walking his dog, and just dropped the bag, right there. He did it kind of surreptitiously, but he still did it in front of everyone.

Probably was a fairly high-value person, too. It was a pretty tony neighborhood.

One of the few benefits of widespread gun ownership in the USA: overt antisocial behavior is less common.

Contrariwise, I was part of the troupe of people that daily picked up these bags along walking trails. One of the few benefits of living in the USA: covert prosocial behavior is extremely common.

This seems normal to me. I've never done it or even seen it - but it seems everyone exercises a slightly personalized disregard for the very society they are a part of these days

Only if cat-people and dog-people don't intermingle.

But given how hostile many cat-people are (see sibling comment), compared to dog-people which tend to also enjoy the company of cats, I can imagine a timeline where this misanthropist branch of humans splits off, goes to live in trees and hisses at anybody that comes nearby.

Hmm, I've known a good number of dog people who dislike cats. Never read any stats on the ratio of cat-lover+dog-hater to dog-lover+cat-hater groups, though.

> goes to live in trees

Mainly because they lost the ability to climb down.

A symbiotic relationship with Homo caniphilus firemen, then?

Culture has been affected by Toxoplasmosis which humans are primarily exposed to through cats so this makes sense.

There's no evidence that Toxoplasmosis has that effect on humans

I watched a documentary on dogs that was cheerful until the last 5% when they mentioned modern day dog owners. The film speculated that dogs might be a considered like a parasite that infiltrates human families and causes them to stop breeding humans and instead only have dogs and cats. So if that’s the case, the evolution ends for us :)

I've heard this before. I think better term than parasite is an addictive drug since we created these types of pet dogs and indulge on them. I feel strongly the trend of dog ownership overtaking people having children, while real, is more so a result of modern economic realities regarding cost of housing and raising a child.

I don't know to what extent cost is stopping people from having kids. Many poor people have kids. And then they struggle to raise them.

Poverty breeds but globally fertility rates are declining. Economics isn't the only thing driving it but parasitic puppies isn't even in the debate :)

https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/06/the...

Cost is definitely a factor, but I think the ease and convenience of a dog over the stress of children also plays a big role. Dogs are obedient and mature in less than 2 years.

It's so weird that cats are still so feline, basically miniature tigers/lions but that dogs went so much off the rails compared to majestic wolves. Sure, some dogs are wolves-like but many just lot the plot: chihuahuas, daschhunds (my mom always had those: friendly but... not wolves-like), pugs, sharpeis, etc.

So many are just... Not badass? A wolf is badass. Cats are totally badass: they're natural born killers, hunting billions of poor preys yearly.

My parents are divorced. Father always had huge dogs (St. Bernard, Leonberg, Newfoundland, etc.) while mother always had tiny dogs (daschunds). I loved these dogs but I really hate having to take care of dog poo. So I'm a cat person.

As a bonus my miniature tiger takes care of itself and goes shitting where nobody can see it.

Dogs get bred for specific personality traits and to develop physical traits. My border collie was a maniac that just wanted to work all day every day. That herding part of his personality was extremely prevalent. Even if I tossed a treat on the ground, it never would occur to him to use his nose, he'd frantically look all around. Even if it was right under his nose if he didn't see it then it's as if it didn't exist. Likewise, from 1000 yards away I could make subtle hand jesture and he knew to go get his ball that was 1000 yards in another direction and bring it to me; over half our communication was body language and it even had context. Like if we were out somewhere and he was off leash, also 1000 yards away, I could nod my head slightly and he knew it was time to go and he jumped in the truck. Same head nod elsewhere meant something else. It's hard to explain but that was the most connected I've ever been to another creature (even my wife in many ways if I'm being honest, he never misunderstood me :)).

Likewise, I now have a golden doodle. It's like having a giant 5 year old puppy. They've been bred to be docile, kid friendly, playful, cute, non-shedding, and the perfect family/instagram dog. But they're extremely dopey when compared to a border collie.

I'm not sure what cats get bred for. Fur length? Ability to shit in a box? I'm guessing they've not been bred too much on their personality, which is why they are mostly the same and still miniature tigers.

> Dogs get bred for specific personality traits and to develop physical traits.

If I was a doggie researcher, I'd be breeding them for general intelligence and see how far that can go.

For example, some dogs have vocabularies of over 100 words.

It’s a cartoon but your comment immediately made me think of Brian on Family Guy lol

Brian is just smart enough to be stupid!

Putting aside the greater variety of physical traits that you describe, dogs generally are more adaptable than cats. They are estimated to have twice the number of neurons and are much more malleable whereas cats feel more hardwired into a set of cat behaviours.

I’ve assumed that this greater learning capacity and malleability is both the best part of a dog and a vulnerability that can lead them to become highly anxious and dependent animals.

I’ve had both cats and dogs, and loved them both, but my goodness they are so wildly completely different animals.

Full sized dogs can kill and eat a human. Full sized sand cat (or whatever they began as) can't eat a human. It's another domestication filter: "can't be able to easily eat a human".

Years ago I was walking along the beach on a pacific island (probably Rarotonga). I'd noticed dogs running about (individually, not in a pack) and remarked how docile they seemed. Mentioned this to a local I ran into to which he responded "any that wasn't docile went in the Umu".

My bet is the other species will be a result of Toxoplasma gondii zombification.

Slightly tangential, but I think that dogs have allowed for some bad things to happen to us. Like, they are available physically, so if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person (your one and only partner), you can get a dog or five, or simply pet your friend’s dog or even a neighbor’s. Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.

Are nuclear families a post-agricultural phenomenon? AFAIK, it's a much recent societal change driven by the industrial revolution (i.e. 300 years ago vs ~15,000 years of agriculture)

> ... if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person ...

There are animals where the male and female only ever live together and are loyal (and not for the sake of the idea of loyalty, they're animals). It's not something speficic to some human societies.

I don't really understand this comment. Are you saying dogs made way for nuclear families? Why would it be impossible? In India for example pet ownership is very low. Much lower than prevalence of nuclear families

> Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.

That's silly. US Midwest farmers meet every detail up until "would have been impossible"; dogs are common but not ubiquitous, and farming communities are highly social.

(Cats, ironically, are ubiquitous on farms, because of their utility at hunting mice and rats.)

Ironically, you're describing the classic "cat lady" trope, only with the wrong pet type.

Seems plausible to me that our long relationship with wolves/dogs has modified humanity to be more empathic to other species of animals in general. Probably impossible to prove though.

I've watched a couple documentaries that discuss your question. I think they mention the aspect about how humans could become more agricultural.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10462930

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dogs-that-changed-the-world-...

Misconceptions about wolf pack hierarchical structures have led humans to come up with misguided perceptions of being an Alpha, Beta, Sigma, etc…

On the plus side, it makes it easier to write off someone as a loser when they use any of those terms unironically.

I am speculating that agriculture lead to human beings evolving to do the sort of labor that it requires, especially grains.

> how have wolves shaped humans?

The bonds between humans and wolves go both ways. Humans love their dogs.

It's hard to imagine how it could not have driven human evolution as well.

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