Listen to a conversation between a student and an anthropology professor.

S: Thanks for meeting with me on such short notice, Professor Berman.

P: No trouble at all, Stephanie. Glad to help.

S: So, as you saw in my email, I'm kinda in a bind. I really need to take Anthropology 304 next term, but I realize the course is full.

P: Normally, I do limit this class to 15 students, but... since your academic concentration is anthropology, and you do need one more anthropology course to graduate, I'd be happy to let you sign up.

S: That's great. Thanks so much. I'm really excited about the course too, the relationship between humans and animals.

P: Oh, do you know much about the topic?

S: Um, all I really know is that early humans started domesticating animals – cows, sheep, dogs – when they stopped hunting and gathering and started farming, growing crops.

P: That's what we used to believe, that canines entered the human scene after agricultural societies were established. But now we're pretty sure that humans' relationship with dogs developed thousands of years before the advent of farming, when people were still hunter-gatherers, between 32,000 and 19,000 years ago.

S: Really? Hmm, so why did people domesticate the dog in the first place?

P: Actually, it's possible that the species domesticated itself. The dog's earliest ancestor was attracted to food scraps that hunter-gatherers left lying around. So...

S: Wait, its earliest ancestor, you mean the common gray wolf, right? The same wild wolf that still lives all around the northern hemisphere today?

P: No, that's another assumption we're starting to abandon. Genetic analyses are showing that dogs descended from a type of wolf that no longer exists, and we're fairly certain now that this extinct wolf was the first animal to be domesticated, even though we haven't discovered its fossils yet. We also don't know exactly why humans kept these creatures around. With the domestication of sheep and cows, the motivation is pretty obvious, but it's not like you can get wool or milk from a dog.

S: Then it's a mystery, I guess. P: For now, but over the past few years, we've learned a lot about the history of the domestic dog. I see no reason why we won't learn even more in the near future. S: I hope so.

P: You know, Stephanie, if you're really interested, I could photocopy some journal articles on the subject for you.

S: But those are written for experts, right? Wouldn't they be kind of difficult for someone like me?

P: I think you'll do fine with them. At the very least, you'll get the main ideas.

S: If you think so.

P: I do. I can have the articles for you by the end of the day. I'll leave them with the department secretary.