NARRATOR: This is the story of how dogs first arrived on earth. In one of the most breathtaking evolutionary leaps ever made.

NARRATOR: And the story of how the dog went on to change human life around the world, in just 15,000 years.

NARRATOR: More than 750 million of us share our lives with dogs.

NARRATOR: We love them. We cherish them. And the feeling is mutual.

NARRATOR: Our relationship with dogs is the most meaningful we have with any animal. But why is this? According to genetics, this most adored of animal companions was once the wild and savage wolf.

How did this transformation first take place?

NARRATOR: For a long time the accepted belief has been that ancient people took wolf puppies from the wild, adopted and tamed them. But the idea that humans took the wolf and created the dog by adoption is being challenged.

NARRATOR: There is a revolutionary idea that the wolf turned itself into a dog in the Stone Age or Mesolithic times.

NARRATOR: The dog may be man’s best friend but biologist Raymond Coppinger (COP-pin-jer) strongly disputes the idea that man was also its creator.

RAYMOND COPPINGER: The whole problem with adoption for me is it’s practically impossible, is you have to start thinking about if you’re adopting wolves you have to be adopting them at 13 days, and if you don’t adopted them at

13 days nobody has ever tamed, tamed a wolf, nobody. And, so I, you know I just don’t see Mesolithic people as having that kind of time to go around and raise little puppies on a bottle you know, just impossible.

NARRATOR: So if people did not create the dog, what did cause the wolf to evolve into a new species? Coppinger believes he has the answer.

NARRATOR: Our garbage.

NARRATOR: 15 thousand years ago humans began to live in permanent settlements for the first time.

Coppinger believes that studying the behavior of dogs drawn to feed at modern dumps can give us clues as to the surprising impact these early villages may have had.

RAYMOND COPPINGER: I think the average person thinks that this is a mess, this is a gigantic mess, but for me I mean there’s dogs everywhere and it gives you a model for how the dog evolved and what the dogs niche is and how it lives, and how it survives, how it did survive in the past, you know, this is, this is ancient, this is ageless, this is all the way back to the beginning of humans living in permanent settlement. There were probably places like this and there were probably dogs in it and that’s how it happened, that’s how it evolved.

NARRATOR: Coppinger believes that with the creation of the first Stone Age villages came a brand new ecological niche. As rubbish such as animals carcasses, and human waste accumulated wild animals, including wolves, would have been drawn to feed on it.

RAYMOND COPPINGER: Now what happens is once the wolves move into a place like this then all of a sudden it’s going to be the same struggle between them for the available food, so a selection is going to take place, and who can occupy that niche, who can be most efficient in the dump.

NARRATOR: Which wolves would thrive in this new niche and which would die, Coppinger believes would come down to one thing.

RAYMOND COPPINGER: Wolves moving into some ancient settlement are just foraging around an ancient settlement, have the characteristics of other animals, is that if they perceive something as fearful then they are going to run, called flight distance. When do you start to run and how far do you run. Here I am in a Mesolithic village and I’m bringing down something to throw in the dump, and half a mile off this wolf sees me coming and he disappears, well when I dump this stuff there he doesn’t have access to it, but somehow other guy that does have a very short flight distance sits just over there watches, and the minute I go away comes in he gets the food. That’s the animal that’s going to win, that’s the animal that’s going to survive, right, that’s the wolf that’s going to be part of this transformation into this beautiful thing we call dogs.

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