Having read and reviewed Kolner-Matznick's "Dawn of the Dog", I think that about covers the modern books on the topic. We started with the Coppingers, then Derr. Followed by Pierotti and Fogg, and closed with Kolner-Matznick.
I still think the Coppingers' ideas were transformative, although there is some updating needed. Of the four, Pierotti and Fogg offered us an apparently well researched, but intellectually dishonest piece, and the least valuable of the contributions. Derr was reasonably well researched, but his emotional tirades revealed a strong bias. Kolner-Matznick is biased, but admits it, and it does not affect her work.
I've come to the conclusion that the Coppingers were both right, and wrong. Their conclusion that dogs self-domesticated is still so blindingly simple that any Occam's razor comparison to any idea that man intentionally domesticated dog leaves the human-driven evolution in tiny bits and pieces on the cutting room floor.
However, the other half of their idea? That dogs did this in response to the creation, by man, of a new food niche? And that dogs took advantage of this niche? That idea creates problems. However, I find it to be a third unassailable fact, to add to Kolner-Matznick's two, that modern dogs came to us via that niche. Still, there is ample evidence that something also preceded that niche development.
The Coppingers food niche theory has a strong foundation, as one of the irrefutable facts we KNOW, as offered by Kolner-Matznick, is that the archeological records only shows the existence of dog remains from about the same time as the appearance of permanent human communities. But Derr points to other archeological findings which seem to indicate earlier association of men and wolves, or perhaps proto-dogs. Pierotti and Fogg refer to some of the same research. Kolner-Matznick probably does too, but she includes more works, and more recent works.
There are some who quibble the details of the archeological evidence here. One thought is that the appearance of recognizable dogs may have slightly preceded permanent communities. Another is that the archeological record is often scarce and only offers peepholes into a universe of possibilities. So there may have been earlier dogs - but we just don't know. I'm not persuaded by the slight time difference (of a couple of thousand years, but it's relative!). The archeological records of the earliest permanent communities is not complete, either. Recent findings have an apparently permanent community established some 25,000 B.P. (rather than the 10-12 currently in common use). Another thought is that those earliest known dogs appear too quickly - there would have needed to be sufficient time for dog to evolve from its ancestor. I also don't find this persuasive - the edge of that envelope - like other edges in nature - is full of overlap and grey area. There are very few purely delineated boundaries. We will return to this shortly, discussing the boundaries between wolves and dogs.
The Coppingers food niche theory also points to the massive change in size, between the wolves and/or proto-dog wolf-dogs in the archeological records, and the dogs who seem to appear at the dawn of agriculture. They speculate that this change could be an example of the domestication effect - where domesticated animals lose size - compared to their wild cousins. And, they speculate that some of the morphological changes - physical differences between dog and wolf - are due to neotony - as a natural by-product of domestication.
Kolner-Matznick, however, points out a range of evidence to support dogs having evolved these morphological changes prior to dogs' close association with early permanent villages. And it seems to me that the evidence, at this point, leans in her favor. As she points out, some of the morphological differences are not what one would expect from the domestication effect. Her work with skull shapes plays a big part here.
Derr, and Pierotti and Fogg, both, in slightly different ways, propose that dogs, as wolves, associated with man prior to agriculture. And they present evidence of that if we wish to be persuaded. The Pierotti and Fogg arguments are intellectually dishonest, but their essential premise still has validity. That premise is that man and wolf could have had a cooperative, commensal, relationship prior to agriculture. A primary argument against this is that man and wolf were competing predators. And, as such, cooperation would have been unlikely. Personally, I don't have a problem thinking that some sort of cooperation existed prior to the dawn of agriculture. And Kolner-Matznick gives us a third option, that dogs existed prior to the archeological record of them. And her arguments are honest and persuasive. The corollary of this is that those early proto-dogs DID cooperate with humans, at least somewhat.
There is one other point I would like to discuss. Many researchers theorizing on this topic like to point out that cooperation between two competing predators is unlikely. Pierotti and Fogg's primary thesis is an attempt to refute that idea. However, there is a general assumption here, and that is that human hunter/gatherers would have no waste. This is based on observation of extant hunter/gatherers and recent historical accounts of same. But if we go back 100 to 200,000 years, mankind was still hunting megafauna, and doing mass kills by running prey off cliffs. Based on observation of current societies killing what remains of such large game, elephants, it is unlikely that there would NOT be an opportunity for another predator to scavenge the leftovers.
Now, there is a large time gap in between 100,000 years before present, and 10-25,000 years B.P. And maybe, in that whole time gap, human hunter/gatherers were super efficient, and more like the "waste not / want not" habits of observed hunter/gatherers. But it seems entirely possible, even likely, to me that there may have been human behavior that was less efficient. Which would mean that, at least in some places, there were leftovers for a food niche, prior to the advent of farming. And this is somewhat along the lines of what both Derr and Pierotti and Fogg propose, although I think Derr was, at the time of his book, still more inclined to think of the evolution of dogs as a human intervention.
One of the underpinnings of pretty much everyone's scientific thinking, prior to Kolner-Matznick, was that dogs descended from grey wolves (Holarctic wolves, canis lupus). And the DNA shared between them is the basis for this, at least in recent years. It is that DNA sharing that generated a call to rename the scientific name for dogs, from canis familiaris, to canis lupus familiaris. In other words, dogs as a subspecies of the Holarctic wolf. However, since that call, (and since Kolner-Matznick's book) new ancient wolf DNA evidence has been found. And, it indicates that the Holarctic wolf and dogs share a mother somewhere way back when, but they are sister species, not ancestor and descendant. That evidence supports Kolner-Matznick's theorizing. So I'm sticking with canis familiaris.
There are other reasons I've been inclined to think that dogs are a separate species. Among those is the "gaze". Dogs look into people's eyes - wolves don't do that. And, dogs read human body language. Wolves don't do that. And, while there is undeniable evidence that wolves and dogs continue to interbreed in some geographic areas, it is also undeniable that "the wolf and dog gene pools have maintained their general integrity over thousands of years of coexistence" (Kolner-Matznick, p 27).
This is where Kolner-Matznick's theory contributes. Objections to the thought that the modern grey wolf would have been allowed near human encampments are valid. Wolves are not tame, even when socialized. They are still wild, and potentially violent. However, if the wolf was not a wolf, but a sister species who evolved differently, then just maybe, eh? And that is what Kolner-Matznick gives us: a wolf who is not inclined to run in packs, who hunts singly, who is more omnivorous, who is more willing to scavenge, and who associates with other individuals on something like a friendship basis, rather than a pack heirarchy. When you put that wolf alongside humans who also hunted AND scavenged (as many researchers now believe), all of a sudden a potentially mutually beneficial, commensal relationship comes into focus in the realm of possibility. Today you hunt, tomorrow I hunt. A wild and crazy idea, to be sure, but somehow it all happened and got us to where we are today.
The Coppingers postulated that if mankind somehow disappeared from earth, that dogs would shortly thereafter die out. This remains true. It might take a few years, but millions and millions of dogs would die. And there would only be a very few, a tiny percentage, that might survive multi-generationally. Wolves would continue. Dingos, by the way, would also continue, as they are the only dogs who are self-sufficient predators.
There you have it. Dogs are dogs. And wolves are wolves. And, while the twain do meet on occasion, they remain what they are. Everyone agrees, at least to some degree, that dogs played, at the very least, a large contributing part in their own domestication. Personally, I'm inclined to think, given what history we do have of dogs, that mankind played the minor role in the process. But that - the modern history of dogs - or the history of dogs since the dawn of agriculture - is the next episode.
