Stray Use of Dog “Domestication”

The research paper about the proto-dog skull found in Siberia (that I posted about here) has generated a lot of media interest with the vast majority of reports focusing on the idea that it pushes back the dog’s domestication from the previously thought 12,000-14,000 years ago to around 33,000 years ago. This is not my reading of these researchers’ results as they clearly suggest that the early stages of dog development did not include deliberate selection by people, rather that it was a natural evolution of the wolf adapting to a niche around people and therefore, I believe, should not be called domestication. 

This got me wondering if I was misunderstanding what “domestication” actually means so I checked some definitions. Here are a couple from credible sources that give a good overall feel for the meaning (emphasis is mine):

“… a species in which the evolutionary process has been influenced by humans to meet their needs" and “… the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of artificial selection, is changed at the genetic level, accentuating traits desired by humans.”      Convention on Biological Diversity;

“… the process of hereditary reorganization of wild animals and plants into domestic and cultivated forms according to the interests of people. In its strictest sense, it refers to the initial stage of human mastery of wild animals and plants. The fundamental distinction of domesticated animals and plants from their wild ancestors is that they are created by human labour to meet specific requirements or whims and are adapted to the conditions of continuous care and solicitude people maintain for them.”       Encyclopedia Britannica.

Every definition I read included some idea of people deliberately changing animals for some specific purpose. Therefore, the idea of the wolf changing to a dog-like animal through natural selection cannot be considered part of the dog’s domestication.

I have even seen the phrase “self-domestication” being used to describe the first stages of change in the wolf towards a dog-like animal but this is an oxymoron. Domestication needs human intent; the wolf changing through natural selection (even though the change is driven by the presence of people) has nothing to do with domestication. The best I can offer under this process model is that the natural change from wolf to early dog enabled or led to later domestication.

Domesticated dog or perhaps not?

This is an important distinction to me because the word “domestication” is clearly a hurdle in people’s understanding of the dog’s origins. There is still a lot of room for debate and clarification of details but calling the initial change in the wolf  something like “the first stage in domestication” makes people assume it was deliberately driven by us when it probably wasn’t. Let’s save the word for the point when we did start selecting to meet our whims (whenever that was).

And if we were to do this perhaps, just perhaps, we might even start to wonder if many of those “village” dogs that we so casually call strays are actually a domesticated animal or not.