• Did humans invent wolves?

    From I Envy JTEM@21:1/5 to All on Thu Mar 10 01:44:15 2022
    I've suggested this in the past: Humans may have
    invented wolves!

    The thing is, by domesticating some wolves and
    turning them into dogs, our ancestors were
    automatically making wolves more aggressive.

    How?

    Because we appear to have domesticated THE LEAST
    AGGRESSIVE. If they were aggressive they were killed.

    Right?

    That's what you do to a deadly animal that is a threat to
    you: You kill it.

    So if you're turning on into a pet, it's not very aggressive.
    And by drawing off the animals with THE LEAST aggressive
    traits, the MOST AGGRESSIVE traits are just going to keep
    breeding...

    Anyhow, there's another side to this.

    The animals remain capable of breeding with each other.

    Remember Mungo Man? The 40+ thousand year old
    Australian with an extinct mtDNA line, one significantly
    older than any "Mitochondrial Eve?"

    So the population Mungo Man came from, the one that
    carried that extremely old mtDNA line: They left BILLIONS
    of descendants alive today. But we'd have no way of
    ever knowing that if it weren't for a lucky mutation where
    that Mungo Man mtDNA (or a version of it, not his exactly)
    got copied over to the nuclear DNA.

    Do you see where I'm going with this?

    An event similar to the one which now hides the Mungo
    Man ancestry of billions of people could have occured
    with wolves.

    It very well may have been a case where humans
    domesticated animals, created a new population in a
    manner of speaking, and then that new population drowned
    out the uniquely wild DNA.

    I mean, look here:

    https://www.livescience.com/mummified-ice-age-pup.html

    It's a wolf pup, but it's DNA doesn't seem to belong to wolves
    or dogs. So maybe, just maybe it's amongst the very last of
    the truly wild wolves. That, domestication produced a
    genetically unique (from the wild population) animal and
    then through prolonged interbreeding -- because they could
    still interbreed -- the uniqueness of the wild population was
    being lost. And this pup is from a population that had not
    lost that uniqueness, maybe even the last population to
    retain it's uniqueness...

    I dunno.

    I couldn't find any hard statements much less data on the
    DNA finding, not even during an exhaustive 30 second
    Google search, so I don't know HOW it differs from modern
    dogs or wolves...

    Just speculating, but it would be a way of explaining the
    animals genetic uniqueness. Not that it's from Mars but,
    like Mungo Man, it's genetic uniqueness was bred out of
    it over some millennia.





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