In the late 1970s, archaeologists made a startling discovery in northern Israel. In a 12,000-year-old village where families buried loved ones under their homes, the remains of a woman and a young dog were found, her hand resting on the puppy’s chest.

This discovery is some of the earliest evidence of a bond between human and canine companions, and perhaps the strongest emotional link between species in the animal kingdom. But researchers disagree on how this bond began. Or was this fire already burning in the dog’s ancestor, the gray wolf?

A new study of young wolves suggests they can actually give people dog-like attachments.

The findings support the idea that wolves may have some traits once thought to be exclusive to dogs, said a human-animal interaction researcher at Oregon State University Corvallis. Effects researcher Monique Udell says. However, other experts say the study was poorly designed and therefore unconvincing.

The new work utilizes an experiment known as the Strange Situation Test. It was originally created to study attachment between human infants and their mothers, and explores how the stress of facing unfamiliar people and environments affects subjects’ behavior when reunited with their caregivers. Measure how it changes. More interactions means tighter binding.

Wolves aren’t born to participate in such experiments, so the team behind the new study had to pamper them pretty early on. Her Christina Hansen Wheat, a behavioral ecologist at Stockholm University, and her colleagues hand-reared her 10 wolves from the time they were 10 days old. The researchers took turns spending 24 hours a day with the puppies, initially waking every two to three hours during the night to bottle-feed them. (“She was like giving birth to ten newborns at once,” says Hansen She Wheat.)

When the animals were 23 weeks old, caregivers took them one at a time to an almost empty room. Over the course of several minutes, caregivers would walk in and out of the room, sometimes leaving the wolf alone and sometimes with complete strangers.The team watched his 23-week-old Alaskan, who had been raised the same way since he was a puppy. The experiment was repeated with 12 huskies.

For the most part, scientists saw little difference between wolves and dogs. When the caregiver entered the room, both species scored him a 4.6 on his 5-point scale for ‘greeting behavior’ (the desire to be near humans). When a stranger walked in, the dog’s greeting behavior dropped on average to 4.2 for him and 3.5 for the wolf, suggesting that both animals distinguished between known and unknown people. , the team reports today. ecology and evolutionIt is this difference that the team counts as a sign of attachment.

Dogs and wolves were also similar in that they had more physical contact with caregivers than with strangers during the experiment.

Additionally, the dogs barely increased their pace during the test. This is a sign of stress. According to Udell, it’s not surprising that even hand-raised wolves are more nervous around humans.

But when the stranger left the room and the caretaker returned, the wolf almost completely stopped walking. Hansen Wheat says it’s never been seen before in wolves. maybe, she says.

For Udell, that’s the most interesting part of the research. “If this is true, this kind of attachment does not distinguish dogs from wolves,” she says.

She speculates that pacing experiments may suggest that other wild animals can form strong bonds with humans. Do we view people who do it as mere feeders or comforters? “These relationships may be occurring even when we are not aware of them.”

Not everyone is convinced. Martagacci, an animal behaviorist at Eotvos Lorand University who pioneered her test of Strange Her Situation on dogs and wolves in 2005, said the results were inconsistent with what her team had observed. says. She and her colleagues observed a distinct difference between wolves and dogs. Based on such results, she and others concluded that the ability to form attachments with specific humans does not exist in wolves.

Gácsi argues that the new study has some methodological problems. Among these were the fact that the laboratory was accustomed to the animals (thus not “weird” enough to provoke an attachment response to them), that all the dogs were from the same breed (it’s hard to generalize what it does compared to dogs), and wolves didn’t have the pace to say anything about what this behavior meant. You can’t derive it,” she says.

Hansen Wheat says he’s not claiming dogs and wolves are the same. “We’re still talking about wild animals,” she says. “What we saw doesn’t make them dogs.”

But she argues that even if she finds hints of bonding behavior in wolves, it suggests that dogs already had this trait early in their evolution. It could have been,” she says. (Similar things may have happened to dogs’ fetching abilities.)

Hansen Wheat says the key to understanding what happened during the domestication process of dogs is to pay attention to what dogs have in common. “People often ask me how wolves and dogs are different, but the real question is, ‘How are they similar?'” she says. “That’s the key to understanding how we made the dog.”