How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends

by Mark Derr

This “informative account” of canine evolution will “appeal to dog lovers with a curiosity about the origins of their favorite companion.” (Publishers Weekly)Many have made the case that dogs have evolved from wolves but the evolutionary link between wolves and dogs remains a mystery. In How the Dog Became the Dog, Mark Derr posits that the dog’s evolution from wolf was inevitable due to the mutually beneficial nature of the relationship between wolves and hunter-gatherer humans. How the Dog Became the Dog presents the domestication of the dog as a biological and cultural process that began with a reciprocal cooperation between dogwolves and humans that evolved over time, from the first dogs that took refuge with humans against the cold at the end of the last Ice Age, to the 18th century, when humans began to exercise full control of dog reproduction, life, and death, through centuries of natural and artificial selection that led us to the many breeds of dogs we know and love today.“A transporting slice of dog/wolf thinking that will pique the interest of anyone with a dog in their orbit.” —Kirkus Reviews

Genres: Nonfiction, Animals, Science, History, Dogs, Biology, Nature

287 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 3, 2011

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a dog. He is the most popular dog in the world. Why? Because if you google Dog he is the first one that comes up in the image search.



This book is about him and his ancestors.

I thought this book would be kind of interesting. Instead it kind of sucks.

A slogging and tedious read filled with a mixture of facts, wild conjecture, strange teleological extrapolations, wild hippie mystical bullshit and enough liberal guilt to make me wonder how the author can get out of bed in the morning with the weight of all the historical wrongs piled up on his DNA (seriously? you want to get PC about the possibility that homo sapiens wiped out neanderthals? and what is with this furless biped bullshit? if you're going to start referring to humans (as you like to call them, furless bipeds (you smug fuck)) that way why not call dogs just one part of the furry quadped family? Birds as the feather wing creatures?).

I like to measure a book's factualness on the footnotes. I think some people like to think that because there are notes it means that the book is well researched. I like to notice when not so important points to an argument are noted and then more important points that are conjectures being slipped by as facts are undocumented. Then I like to wonder why include footnotes at all. There are quite a few books that pull the factualness sleight of hand this way. This book doesn't do it too too much, but there are facts given that should have been documented, especially if anecdotal things are documented.

I do not write my reviews with any plan or focus. It shows. If I were writing a book, one which I was being paid for, and which was a factual book with a general thesis and arguments and all of that I'd organize the fucking thing. I would possibly use an outline, or at least sketch out what should go in each chapter and make each chapter it's own topic or argument or something like that. Another approach could be to write out your entire argument and tangents in just about every chapter, with adding a fact here and there as you go along and make the whole thing read like a repetitive and boring mess. This book boldly goes for the latter approach.

Do you want to know what I hate about non-fiction books? I didn't think so, but I'll tell you anyway. Too many of them don't need to be books. With the amount of information really known and being given in this book a very nice magazine article could have been written, and I don't mean one of those pop-science single column jobbers you might find in some glossy weekly, but a good lengthy National Geographic or Science article. This is another book that suffers from the author has a pretty interesting idea but not an expansive enough idea to really be a hundred thousand word book. You'd think the evolution of dogs would be something a big book could be written about, and probably in the right hands a big interesting book could be written, but the material here could have been a great magazine article. Too many non-fiction books, who knew? type books just aren't really bookworthy.

One could sum up this book by saying, scientists don't know where the dog came from, there are some theories, some have been disproven, some sound good, but there is still a lot about the past we don't know. We also don't know that much about where homo sapiens came from, or their direct ancestors, actually there is a lot about the past we don't know, we know some things but we don't know that much. Here is what I think a possible story could be.

That would only be half of the book, the other half can be summed up by saying, I'm also against the breeding of dogs as pure breeds and I'm going to rant and froth at the mouth periodically about this and disparage certain types of dogs for looking like puppies for their entire life because of breeding and towards sniveling dogs who play it too easy for affection, unless it's my own dog where I will gush about his intelligence at playing the crowd to make sure everyone likes him the bestest.

Hey, you want to know what I find amusing? No? Well I'll tell you anyway. It makes me chuckle inside when someone tries to deep-six the entire scientific process of gathering results through tests and all of that stuff we learn in science class by saying that the whole process is obviously flawed when it's possibly being used to champion a theory that goes against the authors own theory about how an animal becomes domesticated, but then likes to hold up science and wave it around when it suits him. Oh how I wish I had bookmarked the page when he called into question the entire scientific manner of testing hypotheses to show how wrong those Russians are who have bred those cute little domestic foxes. I won't even hold it against the author all the mean things he said about those cute little critters. My dislike from the book isn't based on the couple of places where he said mean things about domesticated and wild foxes. Honestly.

Do you want to know what I don't believe? I won't even bother with the affectation of caring if you want to or not, I don't believe our ancestors back in the ice age type time were really that bad-ass when it came to hunting. I don't think we were apex predators, who the other big bad-ass predators would kind of give the manly little nod to when we went by to let us know that we were all good with one another. I have no science for this, but I suspect we were more like opportunistic scavengers as opposed to bad ass killing machines. This is just what I think though, I have no real proof, but I don't buy the idea that we were part of the Guild of Carnivores who divided up the wild game like Mafia Dons splitting up a city for their control.

There are some other problems that I have with the book. There are teleological fallacies that I think the author makes, and which probably aren't that bad but they kind of annoy me because I get annoyed by things like that, especially when I'm already being annoyed by tedium and repetitiveness. There are also, 'what the fuck?' moments when the arrival of say homo sapiens is a little too biblical for me, they seem to appear fully formed and dropped onto the planet, as opposed to evolving from transitional forms where a 'culture' would have helped to form them in behavior and certain skills. This is comes up in the homo sapien guilt as if our species landed on the planet of the neanderthals like pilgrims to the new world, and those people helped us out and got us settled before we gave the ice age equivalent of small-pox infested blankets. I know the author doesn't mean this, but there are a few times in the book where he wonders how our species could have learned something, it must have been taught to us by this other species, which seems to presuppose a total lack of history on our species part prior to that moment, or something.

I wouldn't recommend this book. Just in case you were wondering.

[Ira Therebel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh boy, where should I start. This is a very hard book to rate.

I find the topic interesting and can see that the author knows a lot about it. But at the same time the book is very hard to read. And not even because of the hard topi but because it is so incredibly disorganized. It jumps all over the place in history, repeats a lot and sometimes i am not even sure what the author is trying to tell me and where is it going. I hate to give a book with so much information only a ** rating, but sometimes organization is essential. In a book like this without a proper organization the reader can get lost and most of the facts won't even be remembered afterwards.

I don't really have an issue about Mark Derr not presenting many theories that contradict his view, but it sure would benefit if he would.

I liked his view on the dogs today. How from being our companions treated as individual living beings they became as he says "biological doll" incapable to survive on his own and basically existing just for our pleasure. If it is not the case the dogs don't have a great destiny (we all know what happens to pit bulls)

So I basically will repeat what others have said before me: a book with a lot of interesting information that really needs an editor. Some good editing and this book could be great.

[ash | songsforafuturepoet · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF because I had to return it. It is very informative and Derr clearly knows his stuff really well. But the book needs to go through an editor. There are lots of rambling, awkward sentences with too many points stuffed in them, and a lot of information is repeated within a few paragraphs or chapters.

[Todd Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unable to bear the authors repetitive, circular, opinionated prose, I quit after the first three chapters. I'm more of a cat person than a dog person anyway ... though I did learn one thing from this experience ... I'm decidedly not a Mark Derr person.

[Bob Rosenbaum · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may be the most frustrating book I’ve ever finished. It’s disorganized, repetitive, dull and fails to deliver the promised narrative. The chapters follow no order I could divine, and their titles and subtitles are ciphers. Each chapter seems to start at the same tenuous moment of that first connection between man and doglike wolf, and presents a tedious mountain of facts, suppositions, dog types and locations only to reach no conclusions.
I felt as if there was a subtext running throughout in which Derr was mostly interested in disemboweling theories of researchers he disagrees with.
If you’re considering reading the book, here’s a spoiler that will save you some time: sometime between 35,000 and 16,000 years ago, maybe in the Levant or Southwestern China or the Asian steppe, a wolf that was more like a dog (Derr calls it a dogwolf, which he seems to have made up himself) found its way into a small cohort of humans, or maybe Neanderthals, and the rest is history. Really. That’s all he’s got, and he says it over and over and over.
If you’re still considering reading this book, here’s a suggestion: Google “books about dogs” and pick one at random; you’ll get more out of it.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

We owe much to our faithful companions. Unfortunately, as is often the case with humans, we do not pay back friendship well. We get much more from the dog than they get from us. This marvelous book chronicles the self domestication of they dog through the fossil and genetic records and describes how we wound up with the pure breeds of today. If you are a dog lover like I am, this book is a must read. If you aren't a dog lover, then you are irredeemable. I loved this book, and it made me vary sad about the way repay our best friends loyaly. Adopt a shelter mutt. You will save a life, and get a better, more representative member of Canis Lupus Familiaris.

[Joanna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Are our current canine pets wolf-like dogs or dog-like wolves? Mark Derr doesn't know either. But he doesn't mind wasting your time with his circular arguments, frequent unnecessary personal asides and general petulant, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude toward actual research scientists. He does have a few interesting ideas, but stylistically this book is really annoying and disorganized. He could have used a good editor

Maybe if you like dogs more than I do, or have a few theories of your own, you'll find this interesting, but I got a few chapters in and decided he had already made his point, such as it was.

A rare "didn't finish" from me.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author writes about how the dog socialized with humans instead of being domesticated. A history of canine-human interaction is documented in this unique view.

[Buck Wilde · Rating 3 out of 5]

How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends by Mark Derr

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Selective breeding.

Now that we got that out of the way: the chief message Derr was trying to send is that we shouldn't think of primitive dogs like those shitty hyenas from the Lion King. They get a bad rap from the prevailing paleoanthropological perspective, painting them as skeevy little lurkers at the threshold, gnawing on the mammoth bones and indigestible gristle discarded by early sapiens.

Derr argues that, due to wolves' capacity for strategic thinking and their hunting patterns that most likely looked just like ours (how we gonna know, though? We're piecing that together by observation of modern hunter gatherers), it's likely that dogs and humans co-domesticated one another, working in tandem for the common goal of overwhelming larger prey, minimizing pack casualties, and getting enough meat to go around.

I'm fervently pro-dog, and as much as I prefer to think of them as dignified, tactical li'l gargoyles rather than the unsavory "diaper cleaners" the fossil record's translators tells us they are, it's all conjecture. The bones tell us nothing, except for where the bones are buried.

I did like his rambling aside about neoteny, especially as concerns gargantuan, ineffective murder machines like mastiffs. Neoteny is the evolutionary tendency for some creatures (often the domesticated kind) to exhibit childlike characteristics increasingly late in life, often slowing their functional development. A water buffalo, who can walk a few minutes after birth, is not overly neotenous. A human being, who needs assistance to eat and move for the first two years of life, and might not get a productive job until their mid-thirties, is decidedly neotenous.

Dogs are neotenous wolves, which is why they're dumber, and cuter, and usually smaller. A beefy breed like the mastiff and its many offshoots has become so neotenous that they can no longer function as wolves. If you release a labrador into the wild, it's not going to thrive, but it has all the parts necessary to function as a D-tier wolf. It's got the speed, stamina, and social acumen for predation. Mastiffs are so big and bulky that they are wholly incapable of bringing down prey. The capacity for hunting is gone.

Watching my cane corso mix try to chase a squirrel, it's easy to see what they mean.

Big square-headed fellas like the English and Neapolitan mastiff were bred for short bursts of speed, and to overwhelm their targets with their lovable bulk. The instinct for the kill exists in there somewhere, but it's buried under thousands of years of this bastardized "guarding" schema, a co-opted version of puppy dominance play.

These big guard dogs, bred to incapacitate and hold, are playing their quarry to death. Mauling is a wildly ineffective hunting strategy, wasteful and dangerous to dog and pack when a well-placed throat chomp could get the job done and dinner on the table right this second.

An interesting book, if wishful and inexpert in its execution.

[Gilda Felt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is really the story of both dog and man, as the author intertwines the history of the two species. Much is conjecture, as it would have to be, but sometimes I felt that the author went a bit too far. To say something is true, often without a footnote, makes it hard to differentiate between what is verifiably true and what is not. This was especially true when he wrote about the relationship between wolves and/or dogs and Neanderthals. Did they begin the journey between canine and hominid? Or did the journey wait for homo sapiens?

What also didn’t help was how the author jumped around in time. It was only at the end, when he reached the relatively modern age, did the book start following a linear path.

That said, I did learn somethings about dogs I wasn’t aware of after the book reaches the time where records started being kept. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to give this book a higher rating.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gets way down in the weeds with regards to dog's DNA and archeological history. I think I was expecting more of a oral tradition of how dog became so intertwined with man.

[Rick Lamplugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

How the Dog Became the Dog
A Book Review by Rick Lamplugh

After a winter of living, working, and wolf watching in Yellowstone’s wild Lamar Valley, My wife Mary and I returned to our small hometown. I was walking downtown one day when I saw a stylishly dressed couple coming toward me and carrying a hairless Chihuahua. I stopped them and asked about their dog. They gushed about the dog’s loving personality and said it had come from an excellent breeder, one of the best in the northwest. When I petted the dog, I felt it trembling, though the sun was out and the spring day was warm.

As they walked away, I flashed on an image of a wolf pack attacking an elk on a snowy valley floor. How, I wondered, did we get from those wild creatures to hairless Chihuahuas, from Canis lupus to Canis lupus familiaris?

Mark Derr’s book, How the Dog Became the Dog, (Overlook Duckworth, $16.95), explains the journey well. Derr is qualified to speculate on how the wolf became the dog (or W2D as he abbreviates it); He has studied this question for over twenty years and is the author of A Dog’s History of America and Dog’s Best Friend.

The book is filled with facts and digs deep into W2D. He looks at the transformation of wolf to dog through the filters of many branches of science: geology, anthropology, zoology, paleoarcheology, biology, and genetics, to name just a few. If you have a scientific mind, you’ll dine on his facts and figures which are presented clearly. If you long for flights of fancy, Derr provides a few of those when he allows his imagination to take charge and writes some vivid passages describing wolves and early humans interacting. I enjoyed that writing and would have liked even more.

For a longer review, see my blog:

http://www.ricklamplugh.blogspot.com/

[Debra Daniels-Zeller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-researched and filled with fascinating facts and I really liked learning about the possibilities of how the wolf became the dog. It's an intriguing story that is still unfolding, and is intertwined with human existance. One thing I really liked about this book was how the author debunked previous theories about wolves hanging around the campfie and adapting and simply transforming into dog. The acual physical record is hard to trace but the author also bring dingos into the picture and it was previously thought that dingos were a separate species, unrelated to dogs. Yet the physical record indicates that some dogs may have dingos in their lineage. This book had some surprising information, but the downside was the audio version was boring and I don't think it was the fault of the reader. Also, sometimes information was complex and especially statistics are better viewed in written form. This is one of those books. There was lots of important information, but mostly it sounded like a school lecture more than a book.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a little repetitive and I couldn't really narrow down a main take-home point. I was hoping for some historical and scientific information on the transition from wolf-->dog. While this book WAS full of interesting historical information regarding Neolithic peoples & wolves, it was hard to figure out exactly what the author was trying to argue. Altogether, it could be that there is still so much we don't know, so perhaps that is why it was hard to pull together into a text.

The book has useful information regarding species of wolves and how their lines helped shape the modern dog. Overall, hard to find an actual "point" and hard to articulate what I learned from it. The book tried really hard, but the writing was mediocre. The author was pretty repetitive and there are some glaring cases of poor editing. Not a bad read, but not quite as in-depth as I was hoping for. Still learned quite a bit.

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one gets a mixed reaction. There is a ton of information here, and I like the way Mark Derr takes apart and examines the different theories addressing the domestication of dogs. But --- I've had Mark as a grad school instructor and know that he's very disorganized so this was NOT a surprise -- the book cries out for editing and organization. The same stories are repeated in different chapters. Topics are addressed thoroughly, then reappear several chapters later. Some details beg for citation, justification, fact checking ... So. Consider yourself warned. You can get a lot out of this book, but you will have to work hard for it.

[Marti · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author would have been better off simply making this an epoch-spanning novel. Instead, he blithely makes up his own fantasies of what the past was like, ignores any facts that disagree with his fantasies, and generally acts as though the truth, since it is currently scientifically unproven, can be bent to be whatever we wish it to be. If you like his arbitrary classifications (dogwolves, wolfdogs, socialized wolves, uhh, probably a few more I forgot), have fun with it. I'm not going to waste my time reading the rest.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways this book is a bit of a cop-out.  While the author does discuss the insights of genetic genealogy in determining the origins of dog domestication and discusses some very fierce opinions about the hostility towards wolves and the tendency of infanticizing dogs and then ahistorically viewing this as being the norm from the beginning in the domestication or socialization of the dog, sometimes this book feels more like a personal essay writ large or even a somewhat fictional account of the lengthy process by which various related populations of wolves became socialized with various groups of human beings to the mutual benefit of both.  This is by no means a bad read (or listen) and it is definitely not a waste of time, but it is somewhat rambling and disorganized and very repetitive in the way that it deals with its chosen topic.  Most of the time the author talks about various speculative matters of behaviors or scholarly debates about domestication and it is clear that the author is more interested in presenting his own opinion in light of various interpretations of research than in balanced reportage.

How did wolves become dogs?  Can an appreciation of the mutual socialization that occurred between dogs and wolves that gave human beings certain emotional insights and living with others and that also provided a lot for dogs as well help us to treat wolves and dogs better in the world today?  How do we come to a firm understanding of the prehistory of dogs and their socialization and domestication in the absence of firm understanding of various populations, the rarity of comparative studies of dogs from various places, and the interests of people to promote their own regions as being the origin of the dog and also the interests of people in preserving the illusions of pure breeding?  What changes were necessary in the wolf to make it a dog?  How long did dog-wolves exist in between the state of wolves and contemporary dogs?  Was it wolves or mankind who taught the others about various hunting techniques?  Where did contemporary breeds come from and what, if any, relationship do they have with historical and prehistorical types of dogs, whether big dogs for guarding and hunting, little dogs for show for elites, or middle-sized dogs for poaching and guarding for the common sorts of people?  What insights to foxes and their domestication have for the understanding of how dogs were domesticated?  These and other questions are explored here.

Those readers (or listeners) who approach this book with an interest in hearing what the author has to say about his speculations on the co-evolution of dog-wolves and dogs and human beings as well as the contemporary treatment of dogs and the harm that results from inbreeding to maximize profit for dog breeders will find a lot to get out of this book.  The author's interest in the cross-breeding of dogs and wolves and the conflict between the desires of breeders to maintain inbred lines of descent and the needs of various professions for competent dogs to handle various tasks related to service of the handicapped or performance of important duties in police work, for example, is very worthwhile.  His wide-ranging search for studies about the genetic diversity of dogs and how dingoes are apparently related to early Middle Eastern dog-wolves is certainly very intriguing as well.  And though there are a lot of speculations and various imaginings where the author tries to guess at what it would have been like for men and dog to live together, these speculations and fictional reconstructions of an imagined past will not be unwelcome to those readers who come to this book with a point of view similar to that of the author himself.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good historical information but too much opinion and no facts on modern dogs.

I picked up this book after hearing about it on a podcast. I had also read a previous book by Mr. Derr. I really liked the historical look into dogs and their transformation from wolves. However I was highly disappointed in the authors clear disdain for purebred dogs which is only presented as opinion in the book with no supporting facts. I would recommend the book but caution anyone reading it to separate facts or educated assumptions from opinion.

[F. · Rating 1 out of 5]

There was a lot of new information scattered throughout this book, but the lack of editing and the unorganized nature of the text made it nearly unreadable. I almost finished this book, but I was so annoyed about said shortcomings, that I couldn't. Also, more maps or illustrations would have been useful, especially when the author laid out his theories about how dogs and humans wandered the Earth.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where do dogs come from? How long have they been our best friends? How did it happen? Spoiler alert, no one knows so the author explores all the different theories. There is a little too much science for my taste, plus some parts are heartbreaking. In my case, treating someone like a dog is a good thing (unlimited cuddles, play time and snacks) so reading about the atrocities we humans have committed to them was hard. Interesting, but not a favorite.

[Henry Wortmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Broad range of knowledge.

I chose this book because I was curious about the origins of dogs. I never saw a definitive history ever available. The coverage was a broad spectrum of humans history along with the animal's history. As to whom I would recommend the book? An inquisitive and curious minded individual wishing to learn something quite different from the usual pap.

[Stephen Ahlgrim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that needed to be written, and Mark Derr is probably even the person to write it. This is also a book that needed an editor.
It meanders, repeats, there are enough grammatical errors that it's distracting. There are even 2 near-identical paragraphs a couple pages apart that made me think I was crazy.
The early biology and evolution is fascinating, but this felt like a first draft.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is more scholarly and slightly boring than i would have expected. I summarize whole history of man: we treat dogs horrible getting better today but historically man is horrible to mans best friend.

[Patricia Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting but technical

Sounds like we don’t really know about the origins and history of ancient dogs I expected more especially now that we have genetic analysis capability. Some parts were bogged down in conjecture. It was a slow read

[Seema Rao · Rating 2 out of 5]

Popular scientific non-fiction about the history of the dog, but wasn't as well-written as I had hoped. The author's snarkiness really bugged me.

[P.K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book, but I wish he more clearly delineated his own subjective hypotheses from where we actually have strong evidence in a theory. Was somewhat rambling as well and bogged down at points.

[Lesha Symons Ervin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of science, but also a good story. Well done.

[Gene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and informative, though the last sixty pages may have been the best.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book turned me into a dog person. 😽

[Richard Kroyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

So many theories....