Ancient wolves may have self-domesticated by staying near humans for food scraps, gradually evolving into early dogs.

They may have been drawn to the discarded remains from ancient human meals, and a new model shows tame wolves could have become dogs in as little as 8,000 years.

"When females were selecting mates, they also had to select males that had a similar tameness to themselves," study co-author Alex Capaldi, a mathematician and statistician at James Madison University ...

However, for it to happen, two conditions had to be met, as per study co-author Alex Capaldi. The wolves had to choose to stay near humans to eat food scraps, and secondly, they had to select ...

So if both of those processes are in play, then it is possible for the self-domestication hypothesis to beat the time constraint critique," explained study co-author Alex Capaldi. The study's ...

Scientists don't know exactly how wolves were domesticated into early dogs, but it's possible that they domesticated themselves by choosing to coexist with humans so that, a new study finds, they ...