16. How Humans Changing the Ecology Could Have Led to Self-Domestication
The dog self-domestication hypothesis revolves around ecological changes brought about by early human settlements. Better organized hunting, then the development of agriculture, led humans to more sedentary or semi-sedentary lifestyles. We began to generate new food sources in the form of waste, such as bones, discarded meat, feces, and food scraps. That created a novel niche for scavengers. Wolves are opportunistic omnivores, and were well-equipped to exploit that niche.
However, not all wolves could succeed in this new environment. Only those that were less fearful, more curious, and less aggressive would have been able to linger near humans without provoking a violent response. Such wolves had a survival advantage in that context, since they could get food more reliably and with less effort than through hunting. Over many generations, natural selection favored those “tamer” wolves.
