alt Hacker NewsIt's clear that human companionship has shaped wolves into dogs.
A weird, perhaps silly question I've had for a while is: how have wolves shaped humans? Has human society in any way been affected by the structure of wolf packs? Did hairless monkeys form stronger tribes because of it?
I don't believe for a second that this deep interspecies friendship has been one-sided and hasn't brought psychological if not physical changes as much as the changes it's brought to wolves.
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I read somewhere that he could have change human sleep. Human can have a deeper sleep knowing a guard will alert of danger.
On a long enough timeline it’s possible that cat-people and dog-people evolve separately into different species
I've watched a couple documentaries that discuss your question. I think they mention the aspect about how humans could become more agricultural.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10462930
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/dogs-that-changed-the-world-...
Slightly tangential, but I think that dogs have allowed for some bad things to happen to us. Like, they are available physically, so if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person (your one and only partner), you can get a dog or five, or simply pet your friend’s dog or even a neighbor’s. Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.
Seems plausible to me that our long relationship with wolves/dogs has modified humanity to be more empathic to other species of animals in general. Probably impossible to prove though.
I am speculating that agriculture lead to human beings evolving to do the sort of labor that it requires, especially grains.
It's hard to imagine how it could not have driven human evolution as well.
Misconceptions about wolf pack hierarchical structures have led humans to come up with misguided perceptions of being an Alpha, Beta, Sigma, etc…
This is where evolutionary theory can be viewed through the lens of coevolution or group selection (a group defined as containing both a selection of humans, and also animals and plants in varying degrees of domestication, as a whole system). This is in contrast to kin selection, which only accounts for genetic relatedness.
I remember in one of Jiang Xueqin's videos, he made the interesting argument that "grain domesticated humans" at least as much, if not more, than "humans domesticated grain".