Morphological differences between putative Paleolithic dogs and wolves: A commentary to Janssens et al. (2021)

Abstract

regarding the morphological differences between putative Paleolithic dog and Pleistocene wolf crania. The authors argued that these differences reflect the normal population variation of wolves, that some of the cranial measurements used do not reflect morphological changes during domestication, and that our canid dataset was small because we inexplicably omitted several specimens we analyzed in our previous publications. In this commentary, we briefly address the issue of within and between morpho-population variability. The results based on our canid sample suggest that the magnitude of morphological differences between distinct morpho-populations (i.e., recent northern dogs and wolves) is at least twice as large as that observed within morpho-populations (between two groups of recent northern wolves segregated by cluster analysis). The morphological differences between putative Paleolithic dogs and Pleistocene wolves are relatively large, which may indicate that they did not likely represent a single Late Pleistocene morpho-population. Finally, we clarified the rationale behind the composition of our 2021 dataset to show that we did not adjust the list of the analyzed specimens. Although the sample size was small, the randomization analysis published in 2021 confirmed that the unbalanced composition of the reference sample did not affect the reliability of the morphological segregation of putative Paleolithic dogs and Pleistocene wolves.

The human-initiated model of wolf domestication – An expansion based on human-dingo relations in Aboriginal Australia

“…These changes included reductions in the gross size of dentition, and a pronounced gracility of size and shape in cranial proportions; most notably shortened and broadened rostrum, steeper face and brow, rounded and shortened calvarium, reduced sagittal and nuchal cresting. Together these traits are reminiscent of domestication-related morphological changes noted between dogs and wolves (Drake et al, 2015;Geiger et al, 2017;Galeta et al, 2021).…”

“…There is therefore a tacit assumption that only a few generations after the first pups were brought in from the wild to live in human communities it would no longer have been necessary to raid wild dens to acquire these companion animals. Nevertheless, wolf domestication would have involved a long and anastomosing pattern, and the process should not be equated to a simple path ending with the emergence of the first modern dogs (see Germonpré et al, 2012Germonpré et al, , 2021aGaleta et al, 2022;Losey, 2022).…”

“…In the faunal assemblages of several early and middle Upper Paleolithic sites, two sympatric canid morphotypes have been described. The Pleistocene wolf morphotype is rather The Paleolithic dog type (also referred to variously as 'protodog' or 'Palaeodog'; Figure 6) has a smaller skull and a shortened snout with a proportionally wide palate, and a higher and shorter lower jaw compared to the Pleistocene wolf type (Germonpré et al, 2017b;Galeta et al, 2021Galeta et al, , 2022. It has been suggested that these altered craniodental features of the Palaeodogs could have been caused by the inadequate diet they received as pups or that their mothers received while carrying them in their womb (cf.…”