The Human-Influenced Evolution of Dogs

The evolution of the domestic dog and the role that humans played is a fascinating subject. Researchers have shown that dogs are better at reading human social cues than chimpanzees, our nearest relatives.

http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i32/32a01201.htm

That made the researchers wonder what else the dogs could accomplish by taking cues from people. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have been shown to follow a human's gaze, but they do very poorly in a classic experiment that requires them to extract clues by watching a person. In that test, a researcher hides food in one of several containers out of sight of the animal. Then the chimp is allowed to choose one container after the experimenter indicates the correct choice by various methods, such as staring, nodding, pointing, tapping, or placing a marker. Only with considerable training do chimps and other primates manage to score above chance.

Dogs, however, performed marvelously, and even outdoor dogs with no particular master could solve the problem immediately. (The researchers controlled for the scent of the food.) By 2001 a raft of experiments by Mr. Csányi's team and another led by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, showed that dogs were far more skilled then either chimps or wolves at using human social cues to find food. Those results left researchers with this question: If dogs can pick up on human cues, do they turn the tables and put out cues for humans to understand?

And a Russian experiment with silver foxes, showed that breeding for only one trait, friendliness to humans, quickly produces animals that exhibit dog like traits and appearance.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/807641/posts

Click this link to see pictures of these amazingly cute fox "dogs". http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=79;t=000277;p=1

"Among God's creatures two, the dog and the guitar, have taken all the sizes and all the shapes, in order not be separated from the man" - Andre Segovia

"...evidence suggesting that the domestication of dogs by humans has given rise to the immense diversity of the canine species by allowing otherwise harmful genetic mutations to survive" . I thought this was common knowledge already.