Anybody who’s ever had a dog could have told them this:
For serious scientists, Lassie and her friends were deemed little more than dumbed-down ancestors of the wolf, degenerated into panting morons by millennia of breeding. But a younger generation of researchers has set out to restore the reputations of our beloved pets. “Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered,” says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
It is precisely their proximity to people — which disqualified our four-legged friends as a model for so long — that now makes them interesting to animal researchers. “When it comes to understanding human behavior, no mammal comes even close to the dog,” says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at interpreting human gestures.
The researchers held two containers, one empty and the other containing food, in front of chimpanzees and dogs. Then they pointed to the correct container. The canines understood the gesture immediately, while the apes, genetically much more closely related to humans, were often perplexed by the pointing finger.
That’s not all. Many dogs were even capable of interpreting the researcher’s gaze. When the scientists looked at a container, the dogs would search inside for food, but when they looked in the direction of the container but focused on a point above it on the wall, the dogs were able to understand that this was not meant as a sign.
Cat lovers won’t like what the researchers found. Hat tip to Betsy Newmark.
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Except they’re not “ancestors” of wolves; if anything, they’re “descendants.”
For some reason lots of news stories get the ancestor-descendant thing wrong when they talk about evolutionary change, and it always ticks me off.
That said, I’m not too surprised about the findings. I suspect dogs that are more “socialized” (interact with families) would score as “smarter” than the chain-em-up-in-the-back-yard-and-just-throw-kibble-their-way kind of dog.