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.
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?