Beth Shapiro

So these two weights of evidence are saying we still don't know.

Right.

And maybe that was enough.

But, you know, if you think of domestication and scientists like to have names, we like to have ways of classifying things.

And so there was recently a couple of friends of mine of mine.

published a paper which they've redefined how you consider something domestic.

And they say a domestic population is something that can only survive within a human environment, within a human niche.

And if you think of that as what our dogs are, right, they can only really survive and breed as dogs within this human niche.

then you need a lot of humans around and you need a sort of steady stream of the crap that humans produce to do this.

That's still kind of early.

Like it's still, yeah, maybe there were hunter-gatherer populations that were more, you know, established somewhere in the South where we don't have dog bones.

Stuff we don't know, right?

There's Mexican wolves.

But we think that the closest living relative of dogs is gray wolves.

It's this gray wolf lineage.

But we don't know if dogs are outside of the diversity of gray wolves, so it's an extinct type of gray wolf that was the predator of dogs, or if they fall within the diversity of all the lineages of gray wolves that are around.

And that's just because there's been so much movement of DNA around that part of the tree.

I think it's a fascinating story that as we get more information, we're going to learn more about people as well.

Well, all of those, too, are probably Victorian, right?

All of the breeds that we think of today, whether it's cattle or bison, they're, you know, within the last couple hundred years.