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How did dogs become our best friend · Luke's English Podcast

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Hi, Simon, how have you been this week?
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, good, thanks.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: You been up to anything exciting or just waiting for taxes?
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: That's a bit of a low blow. So for our listeners,
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: I was late today because I was waiting for a
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: long time for a taxi and Tim clearly finds this
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: ridiculously amusing.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Well, it's normally me that's late, isn't it?
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: True, true.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: It's got to be the other way around. Well, I've
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: been at something called Planets Day today where I've been
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: talking to Earth scientists, physicists, astronomers about... Early life on Earth,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: so sort of following up on our previous podcast that
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: we did a little while ago. And if the listeners
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: haven't listened to that, they need to subscribe.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: Yep, have a look at the links below, folks.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Anyway, today we're in person, we've got a couple of guests,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: and we're going to be talking about domestication. Do you
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: have any domestic animals?
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: I do, I've got cats, well, a cat now. But yeah,
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: I like all domestic animals, really. And we all know
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: you have Woofler.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: I have Wuffler and I had some lamb for tea.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Talking about domestication.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: Apologies to all listening vegetarians. And everyone else, just for Tim.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Anyway, should we introduce our guests?
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll let them introduce themselves, perhaps.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Let's go for it.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Gregor.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Say a little bit more. We know you're Gregor, but
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the listeners have no idea who you are.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: I'm Gregor Larson. I'm in the School of Archaeology here
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: at the University of Oxford. And I do evolutionary genomics
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: and domestic animals, primarily.
• 1:42
  Speaker 4: And I'm Lockie.
• 1:43
  Speaker 5: I'm a postdoctoral researcher in Gregor's lab. So basically the
• 1:46
  Speaker 5: Robin equivalent to Batman. I guess Batman was babysitting Robin.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:50
  Speaker 5: And I do a whole bunch of research on dogs
• 1:52
  Speaker 5: as well, as part of Gregor's lab.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Well, neither of you sounds very English. I have to say,
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: I'm loving the accents. Where are you from?
• 2:00
  Speaker 3: Lockie sounds English to me.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 2:02
  Speaker 4: I've been told this before. I'm from New Zealand.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: So domestication. Humanity has domesticated a lot of species over
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: the years. What do we think the first one to
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: go was? What was the first species that we domesticated?
• 2:17
  Speaker 5: Well, hands down, the dog. The dog has the longest
• 2:20
  Speaker 5: relationship with us. And I guess you can see that
• 2:23
  Speaker 5: when you walk around the street today in terms of
• 2:24
  Speaker 5: how ubiquitous they are throughout the whole of the world.
• 2:28
  Speaker 5: But that relationship started sometime 20, upwards to 40,000 years ago,
• 2:32
  Speaker 5: depending on who you talk to. Depending on who you
• 2:34
  Speaker 5: talk to. I don't want to rule out the science
• 2:37
  Speaker 5: of other scientists, you know. It's not all geneticists, you know. Yeah,
• 2:41
  Speaker 5: so there's archaeological dogs that people find that kind of
• 2:44
  Speaker 5: look a little bit different to wolves. But those have
• 2:46
  Speaker 5: been ruled out based on most genomic studies. But yeah,
• 2:50
  Speaker 5: I guess the current estimate is around 20,000 years, which
• 2:52
  Speaker 5: is what, seven, it's like, 10, 15,000 years earlier than
• 2:58
  Speaker 5: anything else.
• 2:59
  Speaker 4: No, sheep and goat.
• 3:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: Around 12.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, a lot of your domestic animals that we're
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: used to eating, a lot of the pig, sheep, goat, cattle, 10, 11-ish,
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: something like that. So dogs precede that by quite some time.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: And that's remarkable because you can imagine that the other
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: animals you talked about, we eat them, right? But I
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: guess we haven't ever been eating dogs. So....
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: It's a really dynamic, and this is the whole point
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: of domestication really, it's about relationships. And those relationships shift
• 3:32
  Speaker 3: in time and space. And there are cultures that eat
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: dogs today.
• 3:35
  Speaker 5: I was going to say the chow chow, famously the
• 3:37
  Speaker 5: Chinese edible dog, that was used for eating by a
• 3:41
  Speaker 5: lot of East Asian cultures.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: And there are animals that you and I would eat,
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: like pigs, that are considered taboo in other cultures. So
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: what gets eaten and what doesn't is very culturally specific
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: in both time and space, and it shifts a lot.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: So it changes in time too.
• 3:56
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: And the other fun thing is that, you know, people
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: don't have a problem eating a lot of chickens. In fact,
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: it's the number one meat on earth now having overtaken pork.
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: And yet for the first, at least 500, 700 years
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: of chickens association with people, nobody ate them. So the
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: chicken domestication thing is a very interesting situation where initially
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: it's certainly what, by the time it arrives in Europe,
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: it spends 500 years, mostly being revered and mostly being buried.
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: with people for whom those are their chickens and they're
• 4:27
  Speaker 3: presented as grave goods and they're in the human graves
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: and everything else. And nobody's consuming them. In fact, nobody's
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: eating many of the eggs either. So the kind of
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: classic idea of like, and what Tim led off with
• 4:36
  Speaker 3: was humans domesticated animals. No, we didn't really. I feel
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: like that phrasing suggests that we are very much in
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: charge of this, that it was forethought. We knew what
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: we were doing and it was a very good idea.
• 4:47
  Speaker 3: And humans are smart people who go out and do
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: things intentionally. And, I'm not sure that's how it works.
• 4:52
  Speaker 4: Especially given the first domestic, it was a dog.
• 4:54
  Speaker 5: I don't think anybody in their right mind would have
• 4:55
  Speaker 5: been walking around thinking, you know, that wolf, that's going
• 4:58
  Speaker 5: to look really nice. Sat in front of my fire,
• 5:00
  Speaker 5: wearing a party hat one day.
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: And we can eat it.
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that too.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: So, okay. Given, you know, it wasn't deliberate. What, how
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: did it happen? How did the first wolf become domesticated,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: so to speak? What's the process?
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, nobody knows. I think that's fair to say.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: Go on, have a stab, Lockie. You're looking like you've.
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: Got an eye. Everybody's got an idea about this. What
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: I think is really interesting is the way in which
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: people phrase these ideas and the kinds of questions they're
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: seeking to answer. So one issue that you have with
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: wolves is that it is apparently, it's competing with us
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: on a landscape initially. So it's a similar pack animal,
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: similar hunting strategies, and there might have been a fair
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: degree of, knowledge of, but also suspicion of those two taxa.
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: So one of the questions that you have to try
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: and answer is that if you have a wolf population
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: that starts to become more closely associated with people, you've
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: got a gene flow problem, right? Because any change that
• 6:00
  Speaker 3: people are going to initiate, however deliberately, that then starts
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: to manifest itself in that population that will then become dogs,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: those animals are not so closely associated with people that
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: they would resist gene flow with wolves that are elsewhere
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: on the landscape. So how do you overcome that hump?
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: And what a lot of people have said then is like, oh, well,
• 6:17
  Speaker 3: what you just do is you grab some wolf pups
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: and you bring them back and you suckle them. And
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: then you rear them as domestic tamed animals. And therefore,
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: that initiates it. It solves the gene flow problem immediately
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: because you sever that relationship with the wild population. And
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: you've got dogs in about 20 seconds, which also feeds
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: into our idea of how change happens. We're very bad
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: at long-term slow change. We're very good at instant stuff.
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: And so that's how we assume the whole thing happens.
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: But that's one idea, and I don't buy into that,
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: but I like that that is solving a problem of
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: gene flow that otherwise still exists.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: So how do you... Okay, so that's the idea. How
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: do you go about sort of proving or disproving that idea?
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: Well, that's the beauty of a how question, is that
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: you can't. And so therefore, everybody can have a very
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: strong opinion predicated on no evidence whatsoever. But Lucky, you
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: were about to say something with how.
• 7:03
  Speaker 5: I'm just aware that I'm in striking distance of you
• 7:05
  Speaker 5: if I say something.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: No, no, but you're here to tell us the truth, Lucky.
• 7:09
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm exposing it all. No, I'm in the same
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: boat as Gregor.
• 7:13
  Speaker 5: I think it is a complex thing to try and
• 7:15
  Speaker 5: answer these how questions. But there are some good, I guess,
• 7:19
  Speaker 5: hypotheses that are put forward by people. One of my
• 7:21
  Speaker 5: favorites is the idea that you start to get people
• 7:24
  Speaker 5: and wolves in close proximity and they start becoming, I guess,
• 7:27
  Speaker 5: more and more common, sorry, more and more comfortable having
• 7:30
  Speaker 5: each other in one another's spaces. And whether that's attraction
• 7:33
  Speaker 5: due to being pushed into some sort of refugia during
• 7:36
  Speaker 5: a glacial period, or because you start getting an accumulation
• 7:38
  Speaker 5: of waste and then they're scavenging and you're, over generations,
• 7:42
  Speaker 5: selecting inadvertently for the more tamer of the wolves, because
• 7:46
  Speaker 5: those are the ones that are tolerated around human settlements.
• 7:48
  Speaker 5: If they're not going to eat your child, you're probably
• 7:50
  Speaker 5: going to let that one live a little bit longer
• 7:51
  Speaker 5: than one that'll take away your family.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: So could a lot of it just be that, just
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: that rather than any kind of benefit from each other,
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: no danger from each other?
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: I think that's your first thing. I mean, you have
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: to have a thin edge of the wedge and then
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: other things happen. So for me, like with chickens, the
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: first association seems to be people move into peninsular Southeast
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: Asia with a dry rice agricultural basis, which has a
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: particular ecology around it, which then mimics the bamboo that
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: was in the area that the chickens are very attracted to.
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: So it becomes a magnet that chickens then are drawn
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: into a human settlement. People then get associated with those
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: chickens and start moving with them But there was no
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: direct intentionality. Nobody's climbing a tree to grab a chicken
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: and then dragging it halfway across Eurasia to get to Europe.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: And even when they do that, after they get to Eurasia, again,
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: nobody's eating them. So it's the classic Gouldian problem, right?
• 8:41
  Speaker 3: Where what we tend to do is equate current utility
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: with historical origin. And when you do that with domestication,
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: you end up making ridiculous stories about how we domesticated
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: chicken to do what we are currently doing with chickens,
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: which is eating them, which is clearly not the case.
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: And I suspect exactly the same thing is true of
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: every plant and every animal, where the association starts off
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: in one way, and then metastasizes into weird processes where
• 9:03
  Speaker 3: now we start emphasizing the thing that we're currently doing
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: over what was happening in the past.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: Makes you wonder about the first person to bite into
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: a chicken then, right? They're these revered birds and someone thinks, hey,
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: you know what?
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: But people have been, you know, eating each other, right?
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: There's a pleasant thought.
• 9:20
  Speaker 3: I just mean it's not so weird if there's other
• 9:23
  Speaker 3: things happening, right?
• 9:24
  Speaker 4: So, yeah.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: So we can make up any stories we want then.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: So I could basically say, actually the first step on
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: domestication was a couple of kids that got raised by wolves.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Why not?
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: And the best part is you don't have to prove it.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: That's the best part. And what I love about domestication
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: particularly is that you said you had cats, right?
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: We just, we can say this, we just had a
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: paper rejected at a journal because the editor had a
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: very strong opinion about the existence of cats in the
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: Neolithic in Europe. And this... Discontent. in a vein where
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: domestication is great because we punch above our weight often
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: with where we can publish because people go, ooh, a
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: dog or a cat. So we don't have, our science
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: can be half as good as everybody else's and we
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: can still publish in high profile journals. That's the upside.
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: The downside is that everybody already knows how dogs and
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: cats were domesticated because they've got one at home and
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: they will tell you that's what happened. And so it's
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: a real double-edged sword when you're working on animals that
• 10:25
  Speaker 3: are so familiar to so many people.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: So I was interested in something Lockie said earlier about
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: the genetic aspect, sort of doing genetic analysis. And we
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: had a podcast earlier where we were talking with Oxford
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: Nanopore Tech. And so I think our listeners are... are
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: familiar with the concepts of genes and sequencing. So I
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: think what may be less familiar is this concept that
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: you can dig something up from, you know, many, many
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: years ago and still extract genetic material from that.
• 10:54
  Speaker 5: Yeah, we would love Oxford Nanopore to be applicable to
• 10:57
  Speaker 5: ancient DNA. Just plug it into the computer and then
• 11:00
  Speaker 5: everything goes. But yeah, like you said, you're going out
• 11:02
  Speaker 5: and you're collaborating with archaeologists who are working in all
• 11:04
  Speaker 5: manner of places around the world, recovering these just all
• 11:08
  Speaker 5: sorts of fragments of bones and tools and things like that,
• 11:10
  Speaker 5: that you can then sequence DNA from. And the process
• 11:13
  Speaker 5: there is similar to what you would process for like
• 11:15
  Speaker 5: a normal tissue or blood sample or something like that,
• 11:18
  Speaker 5: but a lot more, a lot more kit. You look
• 11:20
  Speaker 5: like you're about to break bad, you know, you're going
• 11:22
  Speaker 5: in full body suit, covered up to try and protect
• 11:24
  Speaker 5: the sample from you. There's nothing dangerous about a 10, 20,000
• 11:28
  Speaker 5: year old bone. It's you, that's the real risk here.
• 11:30
  Speaker 5: And then we, we sequence these things and then try
• 11:33
  Speaker 5: and reconstruct them based on a picture that we don't
• 11:35
  Speaker 5: really have. You know, it's like trying to, Make a
• 11:37
  Speaker 5: jigsaw when you've got half of the pieces and you're
• 11:40
  Speaker 5: using a different box as a model for what you're
• 11:42
  Speaker 5: trying to reconstruct.
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: And so the idea there is you're saying that you're
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: the danger. You don't want to contaminate it. That's what
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: you're trying to say, right?
• 11:50
  Speaker 4: Of course, yeah.
• 11:51
  Speaker 5: But that's also hard because people in archaeological digs, you know,
• 11:54
  Speaker 5: you're working in hot places. You're not going to be
• 11:55
  Speaker 5: wearing clean suits the whole time.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, of course.
• 11:57
  Speaker 5: So there's a lot of precautions we have to take
• 11:59
  Speaker 5: once the sample gets into the lab to try and
• 12:01
  Speaker 5: mitigate some of those problems that have already happened before
• 12:04
  Speaker 5: the sample got to us.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: And so what kind of things have we learned about
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: domestication of dogs from genetic analysis of old bones, etc.
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: Well, we're setting bounds, I think. We're trying to answer where, when,
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: how many times, and maybe use those to establish a how,
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: or at least set up a scenario for how that
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: fits within those relevant lines of data. So where?
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: What do you think?
• 12:32
  Speaker 4: What do I think?
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: East Oxford.
• 12:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah, without giving too much away.
• 12:38
  Speaker 5: I like the idea because I was saying before about
• 12:40
  Speaker 5: you need a mechanism whereby dogs and wolves come into, sorry,
• 12:43
  Speaker 5: wolves and humans come into close proximity with one another.
• 12:46
  Speaker 4: And I think.
• 12:47
  Speaker 5: Glacier refugia, so these areas that are ice free that
• 12:50
  Speaker 5: wolves and humans would have both been stuck in for
• 12:53
  Speaker 5: extended periods of time and possibly interacting with one another.
• 12:56
  Speaker 5: So I don't know, Spain, Italy, I like those as candidates.
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: But also Siberia has been mentioned in all of this,
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: and partly because the when question, our bounds are getting better.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: We know it's, we certainly have dogs at 15, easy, 15,000.
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: And there hasn't been any dogs demonstrated very clearly that
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: have even been inferred from genetic sequences. Time to most
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: recent common ancestor of mitochondrial lineages, for example. that goes
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: back earlier than about 25. So we've got about a 10,000
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: year period between 10 and 15 and 25.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: So when you say dogs, I just want to be clear,
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: you mean when dogs as we know them now emerge?
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: Right. So before that it was wolves.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: And then at some point there's a slow or whether
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: it's slow or not, I guess we don't know, but
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: let's transition into the animal that we now know as
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: a dog.
• 13:44
  Speaker 5: And then you've exactly hit on that problem there, right?
• 13:46
  Speaker 5: That transitional period of like, wolfy dog, you know, drawing
• 13:49
  Speaker 5: the line between what is a wolf and what is
• 13:51
  Speaker 5: a dog in those early stages with genetics is going
• 13:53
  Speaker 5: to be particularly tricky, which may be one of the
• 13:55
  Speaker 5: reasons why we haven't found them or we're just missing
• 13:58
  Speaker 5: the individuals themselves.
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: There's a really fun question too, regarded to how many times,
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: because are you thinking two completely separate, genomically and geographically
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: separated wolf populations that go through a similar process to
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: become dogs, or do dogs emerge from a single wolf
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: population And then that dog population has some gene flow
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: with wolves that themselves were not involved in that original process.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: And I'm curious to know what Lockie thinks about that too, given.
• 14:26
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it's quite interesting because what you do see with
• 14:28
  Speaker 5: dogs and wolves is based on their nuclear genome, you know,
• 14:31
  Speaker 5: so all of the components of their chromosomes, they are
• 14:34
  Speaker 5: completely separate when you look at it as a whole.
• 14:36
  Speaker 5: But when you look at their mitochondria, so their DNA,
• 14:38
  Speaker 5: they inherit through the maternal line. There's at least five
• 14:41
  Speaker 5: different groups that are paraphyletic, which means they each have
• 14:44
  Speaker 5: wolves at the base, right? So There's clearly been some
• 14:47
  Speaker 5: complex interaction between dogs and wolves throughout history that has
• 14:50
  Speaker 5: led to some of the diversity we see in dogs today.
• 14:52
  Speaker 5: Whether that explains it all or just a component, we
• 14:54
  Speaker 5: don't quite know yet.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: So is domestication just a form of mutualism? Yeah. And
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: is it possible then that, so I've just come back
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: reasonably recently from South Africa where we saw an amazing
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: sight actually. It was a crocodile and a stork fishing together. right?
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: And they work their way along the side of this
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: water hole. And, um, in very close proximity, the crocodile
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: would kind of form and make a, uh, a trap,
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: almost these little fish. The, the stork would go in
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: and get some and then chase the fish up towards
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: the crocodile's mouth. It'd turn on its side and eat them.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Now that sort of, is it possible that humans and
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: dogs could have hunted together? Because you could imagine that
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: would be an incredibly effective way of, um, of a
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: mutualism starting.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: I love the exploration of mutualisms as a way to
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: come up with these hypotheses, because what nobody does outside
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: of a human context with respect to mutualism is wonder
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: who domesticated who. That's the thing. So nobody goes, oh,
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: that crocodile was clearly leading the way and training that
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: bird what to do. And yet every single animal that's
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: in association with us, that's the first question we ask.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: And I think because of that, we're no closer to
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: understanding the origins because we're asking the wrong damn questions, right?
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: If we were to perceive this as a mutualism, we
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: would start to ask those kinds of questions because perhaps
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: a kind of a co-hunting thing pops up in exactly
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: that scenario. Or what a colleague of ours was suggesting
• 16:21
  Speaker 3: yesterday is a kind of sentinel thing. Like if you
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: have this population of wolves and people and they are
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: both equally vested in something, And the wolves then don't
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: want other wolf packs to take advantage of this human
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: population that they are the ones nearby. Then anybody else
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: that comes around, they can start howling. Then the people go, ah, okay,
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: now we're aware. And now you're kind of looking at
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: each other like we're partners in crime here. This is
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: what we're doing together. And you fall into that rather
• 16:46
  Speaker 3: than being deliberately acted upon by very smart people in
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: the paleolithic.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: So I read, thinking along those lines, I recently read
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: a book called Ten Birds That Changed the World. It's
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: a fantastic book. You should read it. And one of
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the bits in there is one of the chapters is
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: about a raven. And it starts with this woman saying,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: this raven saved my life. It was squawking. It was
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: making a lot of noise. And then I saw this
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: mountain lion. And, you know, the raven clearly warned me
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: of the mountain lion. And then the author points out, no,
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: the raven was almost certainly alerting the mountain lion. to
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the woman, which it would kill. And then the Raven
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: might get some scraps. I mean, we, you know, a
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: very anecdotal, but I love, I mean, it kind of
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: fits into the story that you're saying. Absolutely.
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: Or like pilot fish and sharks. Nobody really knows, as
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: far as I'm aware of this, how the pilot fish
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: and the shark get associated with another. Now, did the
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: pilot fish domesticate the shark or vice versa? But again,
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: we're not asking those questions. And I would say the
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: same thing for the whole ant agriculture thing. We start
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: using terms like agriculture and we place upon it this
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: heavily loaded word, which implies a top-down human-initiated goal-directed thing.
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: And the ants are doing this too. And nobody goes, well,
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: which ant decided to protect the aphids by clearing out
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: the leaves to get the young... It just starts getting
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: ugly very quickly. So we're good at making these analogies,
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: but we're less good at applying those concepts of mutualism
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: to us when thinking about ourselves as biological organisms rather
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: than as brainy humans who must determine everything we do.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: I guess none of these things are perhaps mutually exclusive either, right?
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Something could have happened... in one part of the world,
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: and then it flips. So the dog domesticates the man
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: in one part of the world, the man domesticates the
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: dog in another part of the world, and eventually we
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: end up with a sort of a complicated, huge ecosystem.
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: I suppose, but even that framing kind of bugs me
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: because it's the same thing. The verb to domesticate automatically
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: implies somebody actively doing something to somebody else, right?
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: And that's the whole thing. So you've got cats, right?
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: And so many people have come up to me and gone, well,
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: the cat's clearly domesticated people, ah-ha-ha. You know, and it's like,
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: we don't allow, therefore there's no middle ground. We don't
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: allow for the space in which you have a true mutualism,
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: which is the two organisms simply coming together without anybody
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: making a conscious decision about what's actually happening, at least
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: for a long term, if not in a sort of
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: day-to-day process.
• 19:08
  Speaker 5: But you do see a breakdown of that relationship in
• 19:10
  Speaker 5: some cases, though, where these domestic animals that were once
• 19:13
  Speaker 5: under our control, you know, that then escape and then
• 19:16
  Speaker 5: re-establish as wild populations. Think of the dingoes in Australia, right?
• 19:20
  Speaker 5: You know, they arrived as dogs. Well, they still are dogs,
• 19:23
  Speaker 5: but that's... The terminology becomes... They can get me in
• 19:25
  Speaker 5: a lot of trouble back home if anybody's listening from
• 19:29
  Speaker 5: that part of the world. Yeah, so they arrived in
• 19:32
  Speaker 5: the region about 5,000 years ago.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: Is that all?
• 19:35
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Okay. Oh, wow.
• 19:36
  Speaker 4: Very recent.
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: I think it's last.
• 19:37
  Speaker 5: The earliest evidence we have for dingoes in southern Australia
• 19:40
  Speaker 5: is about 3,300 years.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow. Yeah.
• 19:42
  Speaker 4: That's fair.
• 19:44
  Speaker 5: And there's a whole lot of relationships they have with people.
• 19:46
  Speaker 5: Some Aboriginal groups have absolutely no relationship with dingoes.
• 19:50
  Speaker 4: Whatsoever.
• 19:51
  Speaker 5: Others use them in ways of society that we would
• 19:54
  Speaker 5: have akin to ourselves and things like that.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: But then I guess other species, it's kind of perhaps,
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: particularly food species, so things like pigs. I know, Gregor,
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: you've done work on domestication of pigs in the past.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: Is that a slightly different process rather than a mutualism?
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Because we're just like, yeah, let's go and eat that.
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: That's tasty. Oh, bacon. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: So it's interesting because a lot of the evidence from pigs,
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: certainly early on, again, suggests what has been termed more
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: of a commensal route, where you get a very slow
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: process of effectively pigs being attracted to people rather than
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: the other way around. So if you have more or
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: less settled agricultural communities, there's a whole bunch of stuff.
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: And the pigs are smart and they're opportunistic and they
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: can adapt so quickly to whatever environment is given. And
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: so they will very rapidly take advantage of whatever human
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: circumstances are providing them with some kind of resource. And
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: a very good friend and colleague of mine has said,
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: if you really want to change animal behavior, you just
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: have to feed it. And she's got a grant. It's
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: Naomi Sykes at Exeter. where she's got a grant called
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: Do Not Feed the Animals, where everything that we think
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: we know about what to feed animals is completely wrong.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: And you can see massive changes in behavior and morphology
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: and tooth shape and everything just by the act of
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: feeding them something completely different. And we're seeing a lot
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: of dog domestication research is now looking into questions about
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: dietary isotopes and to see when is the point at
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: which people are The dietary isotopes, the people are matching
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: that of what would be canids. In other words, can
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: you see that process of if they're eating the same thing,
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: they're probably sharing the same space and there's a mutualism, domestication,
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: whatever you want to call that, but you're going to
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: see that much more rarely on a day-to-day generation-to-generation basis
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: with dietary isotopes than you are with the genetics, which
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: is a much deeper change that's happening.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: Gregor, can I just stop you a second? Can you
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: explain dietary isotopes for our listeners?
• 21:49
  Speaker 4: Sure, as best I can.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: This is not my forte. Lucky, you want to take it?
• 21:52
  Speaker 4: I'm tapping out as well.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Using these big words, you got caught up.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: So effectively, you are what you eat. And so you
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: can measure the proportions of carbon emissions isotopes within the
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: bones or remains of hair and tissue of an organism,
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: and then work out where you are on a trophic
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: level and what you're eating. And that will change if
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: you're weaning, it will change if you're eating C4 plants,
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: it will change. So from looking at the ratios of
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: carbon and nitrogen and other isotopes as well within skeletal remains,
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: you can then place and say, do the dogs have
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: the same isotopic levels values as the people do? And
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: people have used this as a way to try to say, look,
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: these two things are eating the same thing. And one
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: thing you can do that is like, if you are
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: in a partnered relationship and you're living in the same house,
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: what is the likelihood that those, you and your partner
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: have exactly the same dietary habits because you're eating the
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: same thing the whole time. And when you think of
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: it like that, it's like, yeah, if you're sharing space
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: and sharing resources and sharing food, That's a pretty nice
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: proxy then for that relationship, which ultimately is what we're
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: trying to figure out.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: So I guess we should just say here for people
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: not aware of perhaps even what isotopes are, then it's
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: just different. So elements like carbon, nitrogen, they can exist
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: with slightly different masses. Chemically, they're the same, but the
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: masses will be slightly different. And we know they exist
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: in different ratios in different scenarios. So it's knowing those
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: ratios that we use to distinguish.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: And if you don't know that and you're watching this, great.
• 23:22
  Speaker 4: Like, welcome.
• 23:25
  Speaker 5: And on the same topic of like the whole management
• 23:27
  Speaker 5: thing and the use of isotopes, there's a whole bunch
• 23:29
  Speaker 5: of other important isotopes based on local geology and hydrology.
• 23:33
  Speaker 5: You can pinpoint where an individual's from based on strontium
• 23:37
  Speaker 5: and oxygen isotopes and things like that. And that's one
• 23:39
  Speaker 5: of the things that they use in these sites where
• 23:41
  Speaker 5: there's possible evidence of early stages of domestication where you're
• 23:44
  Speaker 5: looking at Are these individuals staying in the lowlands or
• 23:47
  Speaker 5: are they moving between the highlands and the lowlands based
• 23:49
  Speaker 5: on changes in their isotopic signatures through life? So are
• 23:52
  Speaker 5: they following what you'd expect based on a natural population
• 23:55
  Speaker 5: or a human managed population? So there's a whole bunch
• 23:57
  Speaker 5: of interesting questions.
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: What's really fun about that too is that rather than
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: just getting a single bulk isotope over the lifetime of
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: an organism, you can serial sample teeth. So you can see...
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: basically an organism's movement on almost a monthly basis over
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: its entire life. So that's what's amazing. And then Cape
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: Britain has been doing a lot amongst a lot of
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: other people as well. And you can see herds of
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: reindeer staying in one place, moving for a couple of
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: months to another place, and then coming back again. And
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: so you're actually witnessing real-time movement. dispersal and migration patterns
• 24:25
  Speaker 3: of organisms that existed 15, 20, 30,000 years ago.
• 24:28
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so when archaeologists dig me up in 500 years,
• 24:29
  Speaker 5: they're going to say, oh, he started in New Zealand
• 24:32
  Speaker 5: and then made his way to Oxford.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: Assuming there's enough of you left to sample, yeah, they'll
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: be able to do it.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: It'll be all that port. He must have spent some
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: time in Oxford, clearly, in a college somewhere.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: Or the snuff, maybe. The snuff is eroding your nasal passages.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: But the animals that we've domesticated also leave a.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: We've formed mutualisms.
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: There we go.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: Have also left genetic signatures in us, right? So, for example,
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: if you're looking at, you know, in Northern Europe, there's
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: a lot of lactose tolerance. There's less so in Southeast
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Asia where cattle weren't domesticated in the same way in
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: Northern Europe. Is that correct or have I fudged that?
• 25:16
  Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a few things.
• 25:17
  Speaker 5: So there are two independent cattle domestications, the first thing.
• 25:21
  Speaker 5: One of them is in Asia.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay.
• 25:23
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so there's two independent cattle, Indocene and Taurine cattle.
• 25:26
  Speaker 5: And the other thing.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: But did they use them for milk? For dairy products?
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: In South Asia, they definitely did. But were they Taurine
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: or Indocene?
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: Indocene.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: They were Indocene in South Asia? Or no, sorry, in
• 25:38
  Speaker 3: the Gulf, I'm thinking.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know.
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: I have to look into it. That's a good question.
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: Whether Indocene cattle were used for milk. Totally possibly.
• 25:45
  Speaker 4: I would not rule it out.
• 25:46
  Speaker 5: One of the interesting things you see with the emergence
• 25:49
  Speaker 5: of lactase persistence, so this enzyme that helps you break
• 25:52
  Speaker 5: down milk, it doesn't appear with the earliest evidence of
• 25:57
  Speaker 5: milk in pottery sherds and things like that that you
• 25:59
  Speaker 5: see in the archaeological records. So people are suffering through
• 26:02
  Speaker 5: it by eating dairy products.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: Or making cheese.
• 26:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
• 26:05
  Speaker 5: So they're relying on these natural processes that will break
• 26:08
  Speaker 5: down the lactase on its own. So that happens a
• 26:13
  Speaker 5: lot where you've got this hypothesis where we look at
• 26:16
  Speaker 5: a population today and we come up with some idea
• 26:18
  Speaker 5: based on the frequency of certain genes. So in dogs
• 26:22
  Speaker 5: in particular, there's this gene that encodes the ability to
• 26:25
  Speaker 5: digest starch. And people think as soon as dogs were
• 26:28
  Speaker 5: with agriculturalists, there must have been a massive increase in
• 26:32
  Speaker 5: the copy number.
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: Of that gene.
• 26:34
  Speaker 5: And for the most part, it fits. But there's cases
• 26:36
  Speaker 5: where hunter gatherers have dogs that have a huge amount
• 26:38
  Speaker 5: of copy numbers of these genes. So it was not
• 26:40
  Speaker 5: a one size fits all. rule. And I think the
• 26:42
  Speaker 5: same applies to these lactase persistence stories.
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: And the lactase persistence is also, there's a lot of
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: genomic gene flow as well as ways in which genes
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: rise and fall in relative proportion within a population that
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: has more to do with than just selection. And because
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: you've got the size of the population, you've got bottlenecks,
• 27:04
  Speaker 3: and then you've also got populations that are, it's a
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: high frequency moving into a place and then mating with
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: people locally, which then makes it look like they are
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: acquiring it through some, through just evolution when in fact
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: they're acquiring it through gene flow. So it's a lot
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: of the early stories are turning out to be a
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: hell of a lot more complex than, than people initially guess,
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: which is not a terrible surprise, right?
• 27:21
  Speaker 5: So there's three variants, depending on where you are in
• 27:23
  Speaker 5: the world that actually, oh, wow.
• 27:25
  Speaker 4: There you go.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: So there's a bunch in, in Africa, there's a number
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: in South Asia. So it's been happened upon a number
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: of times independently. And all of those have had some
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: degree of positive selection, but it's the one in Europe
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: that people are most familiar with simply because the data
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: sets much bigger.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: And so. Where does domestication science go from here? What
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: are the next kind of big questions we do? Because
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: it sounds like there's going to be a lot of
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: questions that are going to be impossible to answer by
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: the sounds of it. We can come up with some
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: hypotheses about how dog domestication started or that mutualism started.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: We've come up with a couple of ideas when we're
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: chatting here. They're probably not going to be testable without
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: a time machine or something. So what are the big
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: questions in domestication science now?
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: I'll let Lockie go first because I've got an idea
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: of it.
• 28:12
  Speaker 4: No, I'll let you go first.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Are you sure?
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm struggling to think of... I mean, a lot
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: of the questions... I'm not struggling too hard.
• 28:20
  Speaker 5: I guess a lot of the questions that were the
• 28:22
  Speaker 5: target of early days domestication, ancient DNA research in particular,
• 28:26
  Speaker 5: was where, when, probably trying to get into the why
• 28:29
  Speaker 5: kind of thing. But now that we've kind of narrowed
• 28:32
  Speaker 5: that down, apart from dogs really, dogs are still the
• 28:34
  Speaker 5: one that's kind of, anywhere in Eurasia is the point
• 28:37
  Speaker 5: at which dogs could have been domesticated and the time period,
• 28:40
  Speaker 5: who knows. So I guess we're going to have to
• 28:42
  Speaker 5: adapt into what people look into with ancient DNA. I
• 28:45
  Speaker 5: think that's what Kruger's about.
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: No, for me, it's a lot about framing of the questions,
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: getting out of this headspace that people did this and therefore,
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: and Lucky just said, why, right? Why were things domesticated?
• 28:56
  Speaker 3: And for me already, that's problematic because that presumes there
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: was a rationale, that presumes a human actor, rather than
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: a how question, ask the same thing, but doesn't come
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: to it with that baggage of people having to do
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: this with some degree of intention. What I'm more interested
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: in exploring right now, though, is something we hit upon earlier.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: And we're lucky enough to have some discussions about this,
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: although it's because right now, genomically, when we look at
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: the nuclear genome, we have Dogs on one side of
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: a PCA and wolves on another. And there is an
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: ocean's worth of space between the two.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, really?
• 29:29
  Speaker 5: With the exception of people that messed around in the
• 29:31
  Speaker 5: 1950s making wolf dogs.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: Wolf dogs.
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: So Sarlous and Czechoslovakian wolf dogs, and there's a handful
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: of others too. But what's brilliant about that is that
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: when we plot those, they're smack. in the middle, right?
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: And we can get a very good estimate from what
• 29:42
  Speaker 3: we were talking about before about sequencing and how that's
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: been very useful in ancient DNA is demonstrating the degree
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: of hybridization gene flow between populations, domestic populations and other
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: organisms that were not involved in a domestication process. And
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: Lockheed did a brilliant paper review a couple of years ago,
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: showing that you can get pigs that are 100% where
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: they just take in all the wild ancestry possible. They're
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: just out there shagging everything. Whereas dogs and wolves, apparently
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: not so much. And then you get everything on the
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: spectrum in between. So every animal's got its own story
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: about how resistant or how attracted it is and how
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: frequent the gene flow is between themselves and a wild
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: organism that's out there. So related to that is we
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: have dogs on one side, wolves on another side. Where
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: do we think the first dog would be? And that
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: early population, if we're set in this dichotomy, and we
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: do this all the time, we're seeing the same thing
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: now with ferrets. We can't find the first ferret. We
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: got pole cats everywhere, but everything that's being called a
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: ferret is not a ferret. It's just not there. We're
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: finding the same thing with rabbits. We found the same
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: thing for a while with chickens. We just... everything, when
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: we have this dichotomy in our heads, it therefore almost
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: weirdly prevents us from being able to interpret or to
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: see that moment of initiation. And that's, I don't quite
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: know how we get around that, but I'm curious.
• 31:02
  Speaker 5: It's also difficult because it's all part of taphonomy, which
• 31:05
  Speaker 5: is basically like the ability of something to be preserved
• 31:07
  Speaker 5: through time. You know, in the early days where these
• 31:09
  Speaker 5: things start from small populations, the chances of that preserving
• 31:13
  Speaker 5: are a lot lower than something preserving when it's spread
• 31:16
  Speaker 5: in every culture all around the world. So- It does
• 31:18
  Speaker 5: become a bit of a needle in a haystack search,
• 31:20
  Speaker 5: you know. I think that's what we are missing for
• 31:22
  Speaker 5: some of the dog stuff. It's just that one individual
• 31:25
  Speaker 5: that we're going to find one day. Someone's going to
• 31:26
  Speaker 5: dig out of a cave and send to us in
• 31:28
  Speaker 5: an envelope.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: Maybe.
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: I mean, the crazy thing about dogs is it looks
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: like a lot of this is happening at about the LGM, which,
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: a little funny story.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: LGM?
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: LGM, right. Thanks for asking, Tim. When I was a
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: PhD student, we had a meeting yesterday. And one of
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: my first meetings in the lab and the three letter
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: acronym LGM got thrown around probably 30 or 40 times.
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: And I was sitting next to a master's student and
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: the master's student I saw over my shoulder had written
• 31:51
  Speaker 3: in a notebook LGM. And then she went back to
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: her desk first. I stuck around with some people. And
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: then as I came back, I walked by her and
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: she was on a website and it was like something like, um,
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: acronym exploder or something like this, where she had typed
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: in LGM to find out what we'd been talking about,
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: because she was too scared to raise her hand and say,
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: excuse me, you said LGM 35,000 times. I don't know
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: what that is. And the very first result for LGM
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: was little green men, because clearly we were not talking
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: about Martians, but that's it. And she must've been completely
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: confused at that point of like, what are these guys
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: actually talking about? So, uh, last glacial maximum is what
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: we were talking about then is what I mean now.
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: And that's a period between 18 and 21,000 years ago.
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: was the last period of time when you had a
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: glaciation that was huge. Sea levels dropped 120 meters because
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: it all got locked up in ice. Where we are
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: right now is under two kilometers of ice. Shorelines were
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: pushed out, in some cases, tens of kilometers, depending on
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: where you are. And weirdly, it's right about that time
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: when a lot of our direct radiocarbon dates and presumed
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: dates from our phylogenies are showing up around this dog, wolf,
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: human thing.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: Hence the refugia stuff.
• 32:59
  Speaker 4: Hence the refugia stuff.
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: But also it's problematic because everything's getting crushed at this point.
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: People leave the UK. There's nobody here. There's nobody here.
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: And wolf populations across Eurasia take an absolute battering. They
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: make it through, but there's many fewer of them. And taphonomically,
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: we just, we can't find them. And it happens. So
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: it's weird because it might've been you don't want to
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: speculate too much, but it's possible that that's the kind
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: of climactic event that drives this relationship, that forces people
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: and wolves together in a way. But then it also
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: means that the likelihood of us finding it, because the
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: populations are so small, becomes fleeting and disappears from our fingertips.
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: It's like, ugh, this is really frustrating.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: I suppose one of the interesting things about dogs as
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: well is how our relationship has changed with them over time,
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: particularly in the Western world. I mean, you know, Woofler
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: is an unbelievably spoiled dog. but we get something out
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: of him in the fact that, you know, he's, you know, he's,
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: he's kind of friendly. It's someone you can shout out
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: when you're a bad mood, you can talk to nicely
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: when you're in a good mood. And there's all this
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: research coming out now that, that shows, you know, how
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: mental health can be improved by spending time with, with
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: domestic animals, well, some domesticated animals, maybe not woofler, but,
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: and you know, how people who take dogs to work
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: have kind of benefits and what have you. So, But
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: presumably that's a relatively new thing, I would have thought.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: Or any thoughts, any ideas?
• 34:22
  Speaker 5: And also not just explicitly happening now. I think there's
• 34:25
  Speaker 5: still a range of relationships of dogs and people across
• 34:28
  Speaker 5: the world. You think of free-roaming village dogs. If you're
• 34:31
  Speaker 5: a child, that might be terrifying. Whereas if you see
• 34:33
  Speaker 5: a free-roaming golden retriever, that thing is.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: That's terrifying, yeah.
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: The fun thing for me is that if we think
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: about those relationships and that kind of... Wuffler is their...
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: because he's a friendly and you, he's like a member
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: of the family, but that you, if you think about
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: it as a job and you think what dogs excel
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: at more than any other domestic animal is if we
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: need a job doing, there's a very good chance a
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: dog can do it in a way that a horse
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: can't or a Guinea pig can't.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Like you.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: And so you've got bomb dogs, you've got security dogs,
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: you've got racing dogs, you, any, the dog can do
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: something or wants to do something. And Lockie's got this
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: really cool, uh, project that he's working on right now. Um,
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: the turn spit.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
• 35:14
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so I was going to touch on that before
• 35:16
  Speaker 5: because we were talking about the change through time, right?
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 35:19
  Speaker 5: And I guess the explosion of change in dogs in
• 35:21
  Speaker 5: terms of the diversity we see today of little French
• 35:23
  Speaker 5: bulldogs with the smushed faces or massive Irish wolfhounds, that
• 35:27
  Speaker 5: was all a Victorian invention. So before that, dogs were
• 35:29
  Speaker 5: kind of a blend. They were different shapes and sizes,
• 35:32
  Speaker 5: but it wasn't as discreet and standardized as it is today.
• 35:35
  Speaker 5: And that was born out of a lot of eugenics thinking,
• 35:39
  Speaker 5: pretty problematic. You think of purebred bloodlines, those kind of
• 35:41
  Speaker 5: languages that we use around dogs. So that was when
• 35:45
  Speaker 5: they decided that dogs should be this tall, look like this,
• 35:48
  Speaker 5: be this color. But before that, there was a lot
• 35:50
  Speaker 5: of diversity. And what Gregor was saying with the turn
• 35:51
  Speaker 5: spit was that that was a form of dog. It
• 35:53
  Speaker 5: wasn't quite a breed because it wasn't standardized in the
• 35:56
  Speaker 5: same way. But before industrialization, to keep your meat turning
• 36:01
  Speaker 5: over a spit, you'd have children there, you know, turning
• 36:04
  Speaker 5: the spit. but they would complain about burning their fingers.
• 36:06
  Speaker 5: And do you know what doesn't complain? A dog running
• 36:08
  Speaker 5: around a wheel.
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: So they had this.
• 36:10
  Speaker 5: Dog called a turnspin that would run around a wheel
• 36:12
  Speaker 5: to keep the meat perfectly cooked and even on all sides.
• 36:15
  Speaker 5: And then with industrialization and mechanization, it went extinct because,
• 36:19
  Speaker 5: you know, surplus to requirement, you don't need this dog anymore.
• 36:22
  Speaker 5: So people weren't keeping them in the same way of
• 36:24
  Speaker 5: like a fancy breed you would now to try and
• 36:27
  Speaker 5: keep it alive. So it kind of just fizzled out
• 36:29
  Speaker 5: of existence. Gosh.
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: And that's true hundreds of times. I mean, there's all
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: kinds of, Cattle-droving dogs, apparently, apocrypha, probably not real, but
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: that's the story of the wolfhounds in Ireland, where they
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: were so successful at getting all the wolves in Ireland,
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: although there were no wolves in Ireland, but that's another thing,
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: that they were so good at it, then they were
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: surplus to requirement. And so the dogs are there all
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: the time looking at us going, what do you need
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: me to do? We're like, oh, can you alert me
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: when I'm about to have a seizure? Yes, I can
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: do that. Okay, can you go get that duck that
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: I just shot? Yes, I can do that. Whatever it
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: is you need a dog to do, there's a dog
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: available to do until you don't need it anymore. And
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: then the dog's going, what can I do? And you're like,
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: I don't know, maybe we'll just start eating you now, right?
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: And then we see that happening too with a lot
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: of hunter-gatherer societies where dogs get buried, have unbelievable grave goods,
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: have full burial rights, are treated as like the most
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: important people in those human communities. Agriculturalists move in and
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: then you find dog bones again, but now they've got
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: cut marks on them. because they know that you don't
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: need that dog to do that job.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: You won't get that with cats, right? Cats are thinking,
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: I don't care what you want me to do or
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: need me to do.
• 37:31
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: So there's a great cat story that we're working on
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: right now.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: Can you talk about it?
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: We'll save it for next time.
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: Well, actually, we're running out of time anyway, aren't we, Simon?
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: So thank you guys very much for... coming along. That's
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: been fascinating. And I think we'll get you back when
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: you've got a few more, because I think you've got
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: quite a lot.
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: We got some bombshells coming up.
• 37:52
  Speaker 4: There's some stuff in the oven. That's right. No, it's cooking.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: Where's Waffler?
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: The turnspit dog is making sure that it's cooked on
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: all sides before it's published.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: No. Okay. Well, will you come back at a later date?
• 38:07
  Speaker 4: We'd love to. Yeah, of course.
• 38:08
  Speaker 2: That'd be wonderful.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Okay. Well, thank you very much.
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: Thank you.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: That was great.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's amazing, isn't it? I had no idea that,
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: you know, that, I think I'd been thinking about domestication
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: all wrong, but I like the idea of it being
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: a mutualism.
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, me too. And I think I'm most taken aback
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: by this idea of dogs having uses. And then when
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: those uses are no longer needed, the dogs disappear. It seems, yeah,
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: I guess it stands to reason. I just never thought
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: about it that way before.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: And have you trained your cats to do anything?
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: I don't think you could train our cat to do anything.
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: I mean, he's so timid. If you put a glass
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: of water down and it makes too much of a sound,
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: he runs off. So yeah, no chance.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: It sounds like he's won the domestication game there. At
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: least Woofler does something. Mainly he just trains Sonia to
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: give him treats, if the truth be told.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: Harry looks cute, that's something.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: That's true. Okay, well, listeners, we'll see you next time. Okay, bye.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: We'll even hear you.