Do we domesticate dogs or do they and we domesticate ourselves? – 11/25/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

Strange are the emotions that affect the heart of the guy who becomes the guardian of his first dog after he grows old. And after having already been a father (of humans) twice, I must add. I took the doggo to be spayed this week and I felt like I was leaving a family child alone in the hospital. Cry? I cried, obviously.

“Wow, what a way to treat dogs like people. Only in this Nutella world today!”, some will grumble. But the classics, I regret to inform you, are on my side. Lucius Flavius ​​Arrianus (86-160 AD), or Arrian of Nicomedia, when he was not writing his acclaimed account of the conquests of Alexander the Great, was working on a treatise on hunting dogs that says: “It is better if they can sleep with a person, because it makes them more human, and because they rejoice in the company of human beings.”

This is one of those cases where Greco-Roman wisdom clashes with modern science. In fact, the relationship between our species and dogs is so ancient and intimate that, in a very real sense, they have become far more human than any other creature on this planet. This is uncontroversial. But what if the process had been two-way? What if, by domesticating dogs’ great-great-grandparents, we also domesticated ourselves?

If this sounds like crazy talk, the first thing you need to know is that both humans and dogs share a series of characteristics that some researchers call domestication syndrome. No, it’s not a disease, at least not necessarily – in Greek, “syndrome” simply designates traits that occur (“drome”) together (“syn”).

In short, both we and they look like fetal or newborn versions of our “wild” relatives – chimpanzees and wolves, respectively. To be more specific, members of both species have things like shorter faces, less robust bones, greater variability in physical characteristics (such as skin/hair color and size). And also behavioral differences: humans and dogs are more sociable, less aggressive and reactive and more playful, at all periods of life, than wolves and great apes.

Another significant clue has to do with the moment in which this transformation into cuter versions of our species seems to have intensified. If dogs were indeed domesticated between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago, as some archaeological and genetic evidence indicates, this corresponds to the time when the “domestication syndrome” began to affect the skeleton of dogs with renewed intensity. Homo sapiens. After that, the bones of our species become much more “graceful” (roughly speaking, delicate), with jaws and eyebrows softened.

Finally, we cannot neglect the fact that we learned to communicate with dogs (and they with us) by looking eye to eye, something that is seen as a sign of aggression in practically all other species of mammals. Dogs, however, learn early on to follow the gaze of the people around them, just like human babies.

It cannot be ruled out, of course, that the symbiosis between humans and dogs is a byproduct of other processes that facilitated the emergence of the “domestication syndrome” among our ancestors, such as the increase in tolerance and alliances between increasingly broader groups. in Homo sapiens. But it is difficult not to see the alliance between species as, in any case, an important piece of the puzzle of our humanity. No friendship lasts 30 thousand years without transforming us, after all. Fortunately.

PS: I dedicate this column, of course, to you, Zelda.

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