Dogs Evolved on the Waste Dump

Does your dog love to rummage through the trash? Perhaps this will explain why:

... another opinion holds that domestication started with wolves that stole our food leftovers and eventually came to live permanently around humans as a result.

"This second hypothesis says that when we settled down, and in conjunction with the development of agriculture, we produced waste dumps around our settlements; and suddenly there was this new food resource, a new niche, for wolves to make use of, and the wolf that was best able to make use of it became the ancestor of the dog," explained Erik Axelsson from Uppsala University.

"So, we think our findings fit well with this theory that the dog evolved on the waste dump," he told BBC News.

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