Traditional domestication theories often emphasize that dogs became more tolerant, attentive, and cooperative than wolves as a result of selective pressures during domestication. However, Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi challenge this view in their 2015 review published in Frontiers in Psychology. Their work proposes the Canine Cooperation Hypothesis, which suggests that wolves already possessed high levels of social attentiveness, tolerance, and cooperative tendencies before domestication.
At the Wolf Science Center, researchers raised and socialized both wolves and dogs under similar conditions, testing them in interactions with both humans and conspecifics. Results showed that wolves were at least as attentive as dogs toward their social partners and their actions. This finding contradicts the idea that domestication alone enhanced cooperative tendencies in dogs.
Instead, Range and Virányi argue that these traits in wolves created a strong basis for the evolution of the dog–human relationship. Rather than being transformed into cooperative animals through domestication, dogs may have inherited these qualities from their wolf ancestors. Domestication likely refined and extended these traits to better fit human contexts.
This perspective re-frames the history of dog–human cooperation, highlighting that the partnership may rest not on newly evolved traits in dogs, but on the cooperative and tolerant nature of wolves that predated domestication.
Source: Range, F., & Virányi, Z. (2015). Tracking the evolutionary origins of dog-human cooperation: the “Canine Cooperation Hypothesis.” Frontiers in Psychology, 5. Journal: Frontiers in Psychology. Authors: Friederike Range, Zsófia Virányi. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01582
