by Josh Dean
Some of the most common head butting among dog scientists is over the issue of when wolf became dog. You will find a wild span of estimates on the matter—some suggesting that domestic dogs existed as far back as 130,000 years. The latest guess is one from German researchers studying a fossil found over a century ago in a Swiss cave. The Germans began to study the so-called Kesslerloch dog after a zoological archaeologist stumbled on the 1873 fossil and subsequently dated it to between 14,100 and 14,600 years old. Because the skeleton was found in a cave with human remains, and because the jawbone was noticeably smaller than that of a wolf, the scientists deduced that the animal must have been a domesticated dog.
This settled nothing. For a long time, it was thought that gray wolves were first domesticated in Europe or Asia, but another Robert Wayne– led study published in 2010 suggested that the first dogs actually appeared in the Middle East at least 13,000 years ago.* Wayne thinks our estimates about when this happened are far too conservative. He cites archaeological evidence of “dogs”—canines noticeably different from wolves—in 31,000-year-old Belgian fossils, and he says that in those 15,000-year-old fossils “they already look more like Great Danes than wolves.” His best guess, then, is more than double the 14,000-year-old number most often cited. “I’m thinking forty thousand or fifty thousand years.”
Whenever and wherever the first proto-dogs, as they’re often called, appeared on the scene, it was likely because wolves had been sniffing around the periphery of human civilization for some time, scavenging on our garbage, which made for a much easier meal than chasing down and killing an angry animal with horns. Over time the tamer wolves got closer and closer to people, who began to welcome them into their homes, perhaps for warmth or hunting assistance, or perhaps just for companionship and someone to throw spears with (and certainly, in the case of early man’s angry youth, at).* Slowly but surely the dog became earth’s first domesticated animal—and the one that enabled all those that followed.
The merging of human and wolf cultures was a mutually beneficial situation. The wolf-dogs got security and easy food; their new masters got help in tracking and killing game, as well as a loyal and fearsome assistant once other animals were domesticated and it became necessary to protect sheep and goats and cows from predators, including their recent ancestors, wolves.
As they got closer and closer to humans, these animals grew further and further from their wolf forebears as the combined effects of artificial and natural selection went to work. Humans would have recognized the friendlier animals from the beginning and would have bred them together, as well as those that displayed other desirable characteristics, such as hunting ability and loyalty. The early dogs in turn would have begun shedding many of their natural characteristics that were no longer necessary in human company and taking on a different, more human-friendly appearance: shorter snouts, bigger eyes, multicolored coats (wolves are solid in color), floppy ears, and drooping tails.* This was magnified by human preferences—even in our spear-chucking days, we couldn’t resist cuteness; the more adorable face was always going to win out over the homelier one.
The dog essentially became a wolf trapped in its juvenile stage. Scientists call this “neoteny,” meaning that the wolf got stuck at the point at which it was cutest and most enthusiastic, traits that would be very useful in endearing a pup to its family. Once a wolf becomes sexually mature and no longer has to rely on its parents for survival, it also becomes an adult in appearance.* But because a dog will always rely on human love and care, it behooved the species never to stop being cute. In a sense, dogs are just wolf puppies, writ (mostly) large.
These changes took root in what Wayne calls the second phase of the dog’s evolution—when the proto-dogs moved into the homes of humans who had begun to live in settlements. Here artificial selection takes over and “diversity takes root,” he says; the dogs would have become “morphologically very divergent,” with different sizes developing. Mostly these would have looked like the mongrelly “village dogs” you see in the Third World today—dogs that are no longer subject to selective breeding; in fact, when dogs become feral, they tend to gravitate toward this dingo-like appearance. (Case in point: dingoes!)
The German scientist Helmut Hemmer has suggested that the key factor in wolf domestication was the suppression of the animal’s Merkwelt, which roughly means “perceptual world.” To quote an essay by the eminent British biologist Juliet Clutton-Brock on this very subject: “This means that, whereas a high degree of perception combined with quick reactions to stress are essential for the survival of an animal in the wild, the opposite characteristics of docility, lack of fear and tolerance of stress are the requirements for domestication.” This resulted also in a change of appearance in the animal, as well as reduction in the size of the brain, less acute sight and hearing, and the retention of juvenile characteristics and behavior into adult life.
In other words, it is the preservation of likable traits that unwilded the wolf.
The selective breeding of dogs into specific types is an art at least four thousand years old, and—over what is a very short time in evolutionary terms—it has “resulted in the most morphologically diverse species of mammal on the planet,” according to the anthrozoologist Hal Herzog. So diverse, in fact, that Charles Darwin of all people refused to accept that the species had a single forebear; he was sure that all wild canines played a part in the dog’s creation.
What’s most remarkable, though, is just how fast this tree is branching.
Juliet Clutton-Brock has written that “most of the main breed types of dogs that exist today were well-defined” by the Roman period, but the key word there is “types” The Romans had mastifflike dogs for fighting and shepherdlike dogs for herding, as well as thin, fast dogs for hunting and even smaller house dogs, but they wouldn’t have had the desire, nor the time, to craft the kind of remarkable divergence you see today.*
The majority of the four hundred or so breeds extant today were crafted by humans in the past two hundred years, and their work is nowhere near done. (Hybrids, such as Labradoodles, are further confusing matters.) But by far the most explosive period in dog diversity was the Victorian era, which UCLA’s Robert Wayne calls the “Age of Novelty.” He estimates that 70 to 80 percent of the modern breeds were born in this period of parasols and bowler hats.
Human meddling in dog genetics has led the canine family tree to branch in many, many weird and wonderful ways, to give us dogs with webbed feet that instinctually leap into water and save drowning humans and that have the strength to tow boats (the Newfoundland); dogs with warm, silky coats optimized to fit inside the sleeves of a Chinese nobleman’s robes in the times before central heating (the Pekingese—which gave us the word “lapdog,” by the way); and long, skinny, feisty dogs bred to burrow into holes and ferret out badgers (the dachshund, whose bold and dangerous purpose caused it to develop a temperament defined by its parent club as “courageous to the point of rashness” and explains why, if you give a dachshund a chew toy, he or she will almost certainly destroy it forthwith).
“Dogs range in size from a Chihuahua to a Saint Bernard, a 100-fold difference,” wrote the retired professor Ray Coppinger, in The Domestic Dog. So extreme was our monkeying with the species, he notes, that an “adult Boston bulldog has a skull the shape of a newborn puppy and eyeballs the same size as an adult wolf. Its brain volume is that of a 12-week-old wolf puppy.” But while the wolf pup “has its baby teeth, . . . the Boston bulldog has permanent adult teeth stuck into a puppy jaw.”
One thing I’ve always wondered is which breed is closest to the wolf. Is there a modern-day rendition of the proto-dog? Based on appearance you might think this would be the husky or malamute—both of which look very much like gray wolves. Robert Wayne swiftly stomps on that opinion, warning that appearance isn’t helpful in this regard. “You can’t use modern-day phenotype to judge whether a breed is wolflike,” he said. “It’s mostly a human construct.”
> Certainly you could make a case for the basenji, an African breed that has never taken on two dog adaptations: Like a wolf, it does not bark. Also like a wolf, it has only one heat cycle per year* and can bear only a single litter in a year. I’ve also heard an argument for the Canaan dog, a herding breed originating in Israel that is really just a feral dog that was domesticated in the 1930s. Because these were essentially wild dogs interbreeding for thousands of years in the Middle East—which is now thought to be the birthplace of dogs—might these not be the closest we have to proto-dogs? This is still unclear.
A slightly easier question, however, is which breed is most different from the wolf. Not genetically, of course; they’re all equally different (or, rather, similar) to wolves, but if we’re going on aesthetics alone, a strong case could be made for the Pekingese, an ancient Chinese breed that in its dog-show coat looks like a Pac-Man ghost bred to angora goat, and its closest relative by appearance would seem to be Cousin Itt from The Addams Family. Juliet Clutton-Brock calls it “the most highly bred” example of a dog and says, “with its soft fur, large eyes and ‘infantile’ face,” the breed “must represent ideal baby substitute and the complete antithesis of the wolf.”
Not content to quit there, she goes on, “The development of the skull of the Pekingese from that of the wolf must rank as one of the most extraordinary examples known of morphological variation within a single biological species.”
There you have it: Pekingese = antiwolf.
There are three principal ways that breeds can develop. The first is what Darwin called “sports,” which was his confusing term for mutants that appear in a litter. Maybe it’s a dog born with unusually short limbs. You then breed that to another short-limbed relative and within a few generations you have mostly (and then entirely) dogs with short legs. “That’s the principle way that many fancy breeds came into existence,” explains Robert Wayne. To make themselves feel better about messing with nature, humans would attach functional significance after the fact. “Dachshunds, the folklore says, are bred to chase badgers down holes,” Wayne says. “But actually the nature of the mutation restrained what the breed looked like.” What he means is that because they had short legs, they were able to go into holes, not vice versa. But when we explain their appearance, we explain it backward—that is, they go into holes, and thus they are short-legged.
The second way you get a breed is by crossbreeding. You mate two distinct types—say, mastiff and dachshund—and the genes that cause the phenotypes you’re looking for (toughness; or large, square heads; or short legs) begin to sort out, and you select the puppies that display them. You then breed the short-legged mastiffs back to regular mastiffs to transfer the genes, and through generations you start to see those dogs more and more. This crossbreeding followed by selection has, over time, moved certain phenotypes (stubby legs, barrel chests) “all across dogdom,” says Wayne. The dog genome is so malleable that to transfer dwarfism, for instance, to a whole new part of the family tree takes only a few generations. It’s the reason you now see merle coats, like Jack’s, in so many breeds, and the trait has become so widespread that we don’t yet know where it first appeared.
Method three is what’s known as “idea-driven selection.” We start with an idea of what we want—a variety of cattle with a low ratio of fat to meat, say—and over many generations select out the individuals in which this quality appears. “That’s the one that Darwin chose as the analog for what happens in nature,” says Wayne, and is the reason “we have miraculous cattle and high-yielding corn.” But it doesn’t happen with dogs very often, because it takes so long and such a large pool of animals. The only examples he can think of where this might be true in dogs, oddly enough, are with the herders, which may have been “progressively selected” over many, many years.
One place this was done with canines—though not dogs—was in Siberia, where the Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev began a fascinating experiment in the 1940s that continues to this day under the supervision of his successor, Lyudmila Trut. Belyaev wanted to observe domestication and artificial selection in progress and so started with a massive farm of silver foxes. Over many hundreds of generations, he selected out for docility; considering that these were wild animals, with a very active fight-or-flight instinct, in the early stages this was measured by “flight distance.” This was not, as I first interpreted it, which foxes were fine with being picked up and stroked but rather how close Belyaev could get to a particular animal without it freaking out.*
The most docile foxes were bred together until, slowly but surely, aggression would fade. Belyaev’s theory going in was that the key factor in domestication was that the least-most-afraid animals started the process, and he was right. He was able, over many years, to create a domesticated fox that would coexist happily with humans, and that’s just half of what he found out there on the frozen tundra of far eastern Russia. As the foxes became tamer, they underwent the exact transformation that wolves did—their snouts shortened, their ears drooped, and their solid coats began to develop spots; in other words, they, too, began to freeze in adolescence. Some fox-dogs were even sold as pets.
That’s all well and good, but where did Jack—as, one could argue, a Grecian ideal of the Australian shepherd—come from? Everyone in the Aussie community agrees that the dogs are not actually, despite their name, a product of Australia, but beyond that there’s little agreement. What is likely is that the breed as we know it arose semiorganically on sheep ranches in the Midwest and West of the United States.
Part of the problem is one of nomenclature between the British Isles and the Americas. All (or nearly all) of the breeds extant in the Aussie’s lineage are what would generally be called “collies,” which in England simply means herding dogs and thus is synonymous with “shepherd dogs.” The confusion lies in the definition of “collie” in America, where it has come to mean a long-snouted and silky-coated tan-and-white dog of the sort made famous by the TV character Lassie.* The “collie” you find in the AKC registry is exactly this.* It’s this domination of the term that always confused me about border collies, which look far more like Australian shepherds than Lassie dogs. Now I understand—it’s because of the terms’ interchangeability in the UK.
The best guess of what happened is that a variety of shepherd dogs were working out west, interbreeding with whatever other herding dogs happened to be working nearby. The gene pool further diversified when dogs from the East began to arrive in the late nineteenth century along with reinforcement flocks meant to replace sheep that had originally arrived with the Spanish but became lunch during the Gold Rush and the Civil War. These dogs were lower and rangier and accompanied sheep that may have been imported from Australia. Which is one good guess as to how the name arose. Other shepherd dogs in the West originated in Spain—these were larger dogs—and since many shepherds were of Basque origins, there is a prevailing wisdom that Australian shepherds are more Spanish than anything. Blurring this distinction between countries is the fact that the dogs that did come from Australia were originally from Europe anyway; Basque herders, who followed the dwindling shepherd jobs around the world, took them to Australia and then from there to America.
In truth the breed is almost certainly all of the above. Americans living in the West generically called the dogs the British would refer to as collies “English shepherds,” even though there was no such breed in England.* And because the newly arriving sheep had Australian provenance, it’s quite possible the same naming logic applied to the dogs that came with them. As Linda Rorem wrote in an article about the breed’s history that appeared in a 1987 issue of Dog World magazine: “People seeing sheep from Australia being unloaded at their destination may have noticed merle dogs accompanying the flocks. They then associated that color and general appearance with similar herding dogs in the area, irrespective of the actual background of individual dogs, calling such dogs in general ‘Australian Shepherds.’”
Slowly but surely
the name began to stick, and soon all these American stock dogs would be known as Australian shepherds. Rorem writes:
Over time, references to the Australian Shepherd began to appear more often. An article about a shipwreck on the Oregon coast in 1881 relates that a half-grown Australian Shepherd pup was found alive on the beach near the bodies of the lost crew. An Australian Shepherd appeared in a dog show in Idaho in 1905. Lost and found ads mention, among others, a blue Australian Shepherd dog with one-half stub tail lost in Woodland, California in 1911 and a black and white Australian Shepherd pup lost in Reno, Nevada the same year. In the 1910s and 20s there are Australian Shepherds listed for sale in newspapers in California, Nevada, Montana, and even Alberta, Canada, with mentions of these kinds becoming more frequent as time went on. In the late 1920s and early 1930s an Australian Shepherd named Bunk appeared in movies with cowboy star Jack Hoxie, and was in some non-Westerns as well, such as the 1928 versions of “Shepherd of the Hills” and “Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come.”*
The reality is that it’s impossible to reconstruct an exact history of the breed. Among the many surprises I found while doing my research is that specific breeds don’t tend to have a succinct, annotated history; while many were very specifically engineered from a traceable set of ancestors, others—like the Aussie—just sort of happened by circumstance. The Australian shepherd isn’t simply Australian, or English, or Spanish. It’s all of the above. Though the very best answer is that it’s American.
