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Man’s Best Friend: The History of Dog Domestication

Khalid Elhassan June 3, 2025 16 min

18. Did Dogs Domesticate Themselves?

A domestic dog and its closest wild relatives, the grey wolves. Scientific American

The dog, Canis familiaris, is humanity’s oldest domesticated animal, with a shared history that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Among the various theories proposed to explain how dogs became our companions, one of the most compelling is the self-domestication hypothesis. In traditional domestication, humans actively select and breed animals for desirable traits. Self-domestication proposes that early dogs exploited a new ecological niche created by humans, and in the process essentially domesticated themselves. The hypothesis offers a rich, interdisciplinary explanation that combines evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, and ethology.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.