Humans took a wolf-ancestor and turned it into all the dogs we know today. What would happen if we went full dog on some other animals?
Take a look at this majestic grey wolf:
Retron / Via commons.wikimedia.org
A wolf ancestor very similar to that mighty beast spawned all the dogs we know today, including this fella:
Daniel Stockman / Via Flickr: evocateur
According to Greger Larson, an expert in the evolutionary history of dog domestication at the University of Oxford, there's a lot we don't know about the process.
We know that they were the first domesticated animal of any kind and likely came from a population of grey wolf ancestors. "Beyond that," Larson told BuzzFeed Science, "we don't know a whole lot."
He speculates that there were two key steps. First some dogs probably hung around humans to eat their food and humans tolerated them because they were mean to their mutual predators. After that, he said, there would be an evolutionary benefit to be friendly to humans — a sort of unintentional domestication. From that point on, humans realized they could breed for specific traits, and that's when things got wild.
twentytrucks / Via youtube.com
When it comes to altering the traits of a domestic animals, Larson says there are four main areas that are fairly easy to modify from a genetic standpoint:
Alex Kasprak for BuzzFeed
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