History and Evolution of Dogs Essay Example for Free

History and Evolution of Dogs EssayDomestic dogs inherited complex behaviors from their wolf ancestors, being pack hunters with complex body language. These sophisticated forms of companionable cognition and communication may account for their trainability, playfulness, and ability to fit into human households and social situations, and these attributes have given dogs a relationship with humans that has enabled them to become wiz of the most successful species on the planet today. Although experts largely disagree over the details of dog vapidity, it is agreed that human interaction played a pregnant role in shaping the subspecies. Shortly after domestication, dogs became ubiquitous in human populations, and spread throughout the world. Emigrants from Siberia likely crossed the Bering Strait with dogs in their company, and nearly experts suggest the use of sled dogs may have been critical to the success of the waves that entered North America about 12,000 years ago, althou gh the early archaeological test of dog-like canids in North America dates from about 9,000 years ago. Dogs were an important part of life for the Athabascan population in North America, and were their only domesticated animal.The divergence date of roughly 15,000 years ago is based in part on archaeological evidence that demonstrates the domestication of dogs occurred more than 15,000 years ago,and some genetic evidence indicates the domestication of dogs from their wolf ancestors began in the late Upper Paleolithic close to the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary, between 17,000 and 14,000 years ago. But there is a wide range of other, remote findings that make this issue controversial.Archaeological evidence suggests the latest dogs could have diverged from wolves was roughly 15,000 years ago, although it is possible they diverged much earlier. In 2008, a team of international scientists released findings from an minelaying at Goyet Cave in Belgium declaring a large, toothy canine existed 31,700 years ago and ate a diet of horse, musk ox and reindeer. Prior to this Belgian discovery, the earliest dog fossils were two large skulls from Russia and a mandible from Germany dated from roughly 14,000 years ago.Remains of smaller dogs from Natufian cave deposits in the Middle East, including the earliest sepulture of a human being with a domestic dog, have been dated to around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. There is a great deal of archaeological evidence for dogs throughout Europe and Asia around this period and through the next two thousand years, with fossils uncovered in Germany, the French Alps, and Iraq, and cave paintings in Turkey The oldest stiff of a domesticated dog in the Americas were found in Texas and have been dated to about 9,400 years ago.