Quote Originally Posted by WingedWolfPsion View Post
Omnibus--Of course we selectively bred dogs for a variety of purposes. We just didn't deliberately DOMESTICATE them. That happened as a result of natural human and dog interaction over time, not through a deliberate course of actions by either species. They evolved to become domesticated, in order to become the symbiotic species they are today. The original dogs looked much like dingos, much like feral dogs everywhere today--the medium-sized yellow dog. That's the natural dog prior to all selective breeding.
All of this may be true but it may not be true. The problem with saying definitely one way or the other is that all we have to go on is fossils and modern genetics, fossils don't tell us much about how DOMESTICATED a species was or wasn't and the genetic record is muddied by thousands of years of selective breeding. That selective breeding makes it very hard to tell what actually happened with dogs. Its hotly debated to this day when, where and with what base species dogs were domesticated. Some even believe that the modern dog is the result of the domestication of 2 or 3 wild dogs species. At the end of the day I would have to agree that DOMESTICATION was just something that happened. Dogs were prone to it and so were humans. This can easily be seen in how easily a wild wolf can be integrated into a human family. Wolf hybrids being even easier and less than 1/4 wolf is basically a dog.