Biologist: wolves have started to turn into dogs
Researchers from Australia’s Deakin University have concluded that wolves in different countries of the world gradually begin to turn into dogs: they increasingly feed on garbage of civilization and friendly react to humans. This was reported in the journal Bioscience.
In 2014 the author of this study, Thomas Newsome spoke about wild dogs and dingoes live in the Australian desert Tanami. It turned out that they moved on to food scraps, were thicker and less aggressive. Moreover, they started to interbreed with the local stray dogs — they are already genetically different from other dingoes that theoretically could be the basis for the formation of new subspecies.
According to Kusama, the same processes occur with the wolves. Livestock and scum already make up 32% of their diet. New diet affects everything: the size of the flocks to behavior. Like Dingo, “parasitic” on human civilization, the wolves begin to breed with dogs (in North America with coyotes). Hypothesis Ntsama is that now the wolves follow the path of their ancient ancestors who were the dogs.
However, other scholars have accepted this hypothesis with skepticism. The proximity of wolves to humans soon lead to their extermination, not to tame, says Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California in Los Angeles. In addition, unlike dingoes, wolves move around too much so that food from garbage dumps somehow led to their genetic isolation, he said.