Our relationships with dogs stretch deep into the past.
Just ask archaeologists who have found evidence of humans burying dogs next to their owners as far back as 14.000 years ago.
But the origins of our relationship with dogs remain a source of great debate, despite overwhelming evidence that canines were the first animals ever domesticated by humans.
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Origin stories
There are two main conflicting theories about how the alliance between humans and canines was first established between 15.000 and 40.000 years ago in Europe or Asia.
The interspecies adoption theory posits how we accidentally domesticated prehistoric gray wolves, the common ancestor of all dogs, by keeping their pups as pets.
The theory of commensalism assumes that wolves practically domesticated themselves by hanging around human dwellings in search of discarded food scraps.
One proponent of the latter argument is Krishna Viramah of Stony Brook University in New York.
"Those wolves that are tamer and less aggressive would be more successful at that," he explains.
"Although humans didn't derive any benefit from this process at first, over time they would develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with these animals, which eventually evolved into the dogs we have today."
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Pat Shipman, a retired professor of anthropology and a respected expert on the history of human-animal interactions, says a strong bond then developed between species that had previously found little common interest in each other's company.
"When you think of all the inventions we've created and the shortcuts we've found to be able to do things, animal domestication is an outstanding example."
“But taming wolves was not an obvious thing. Not only were they dangerous, but they also competed with humans for resources," adds Shipman.
The retired professor explains that both wolves and humans eventually saw the mutual benefit of cooperation.
For humans, wolves became useful guardians from enemies, as well as hunting partners who provided a helping hand in the search for larger game.
As archeology shows, wolves/dogs have become extended members of the human family - in addition to burial sites, there are prehistoric cave drawings that describe them as pets.
Shipman even presented the theory in a book Our oldest followers that cooperation with dogs was one of the reasons that could explain how Homo sapiens survived and Neanderthals, our most famous relatives, did not.
"The human-wolf alliance dominated the food chain," she believes.
The commensalism hypothesis recently received another boost: in a study published last December, Finnish researchers theorized that hunter-gatherers shared excess meat with wolves because humans could not—and still cannot—subsist on protein alone.
"After this initial period, the first dogs became domesticated, used in a number of ways, as hunting partners, pack animals, and guards," the researchers wrote.
Parental care
James Serpel, an expert on human-animal relations at the University of Pennsylvania, does not question the mutual benefit of domesticating dogs.
But in a study published last April in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science, Serpel argues that cross-species adoption is a more plausible explanation for how wolves eventually became dogs.
To begin with, this expert points out that the size of the human population was really small tens of thousands of years ago and people usually lived in small and scattered groups, which would not have resulted in much waste.
"Also, when you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they don't just throw things away," says Serpel.
"There are many examples in the literature of hunter-gatherers deliberately hiding animal remains so that other animals would not find them."
Serpel believes that our ancestors "didn't want large carnivores visiting their homes on a regular basis."
"In southern Africa, modern Bushman hunter-gatherers make a special effort to scare away lions, for example," he says.
"So the last thing people in the past would have wanted was to encourage dangerous animals to linger on the fringes of their communities."
However, Serpel and other proponents of the interspecies adoption theory suspect that our ancestors were not so different from us in their liking for cubs.
They claim that ancient humans would capture wolf cubs, and the animals would often return to the wild when they grew up.
But some captured pups may have liked human company and would be willing to stay.
"Once you start breeding these unusually tame and friendly wolves, you get this new species of animal that's very different from the wild species," Serpel says.
"But it happened by accident at first, not by design."
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The right animal at the right time?
The original domestication of dogs happened too long ago to be likely to one day find definitive proof of how it happened, so it will likely remain shrouded in mystery.
But what experts from both "adopting" and "slaughtering" camps agree on is that no other animal except the wolf could become our "oldest friend".
"We treated the wolves as fellow hunters," says Pat Shipman.
"What we wanted from life was not radically different from what the wolves wanted."
"We domesticated most animals early in human history because we wanted to eat them or use them to carry things," she adds.
James Serpel also agrees that wolves and humans were "a really good pair".
"Some scientists argue that wolves and humans were probably pre-adapted to living together: they ate the same things, had the same type of community size and the same type of parental care," he says.
"Many things about us and them were quite similar."
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