Entre Chien et Loup: How Dogs Began
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2021
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Scientists agree that dogs evolved from wolves, but exactly how and when that happened is hotly contested. In this episode, Origin Stories contributor Neil Sandell examines the evolution of the relationship between dogs and humans, and explores the journey from wolf to dog.
This story was originally produced for the CBC program IDEAS.
Click here for a transcript of this episode.
Guests in this episode: (in order of appearance)
Angela Perri is an archaeologist at Durham University, U.K.
Sebastian Dicenaire is a French playwright and audio producer living in Brussels
Greger Larson is director of the Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network at the University of Oxford, U.K.
Kathryn Lord is an evolutionary biologist at the Karlsson Lab of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Broad Institute.
Mietje Germonpré is a palaeontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.
Sarah Marshall-Pescini is a behavioural scientist at the Wolf Science Center in Austria, and the Domestication Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.
Friederike Range is a biologist and co-founder of the Wolf Science Center. She is a research professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.
Giulia Cimarelli is a biologist at the Wolf Science Center, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Domestication Lab at University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna.
Credits
This episode was produced by Neil Sandell. Find him on Twitter.
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The Leakey Foundation
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:06.0 | Sadie, you are a wolf. |
| 0:13.0 | Even better. |
| 0:18.0 | Not even from the lineage of wolves that we know of now, but of this kind of |
| 0:26.0 | magical ancient wolf ancestor that is extinct now. Dogs are the personification of an animal that is no longer alive and our only kind of link to that |
| 0:42.5 | animal is these dogs that live with us. Like you, Sadie. |
| 0:49.3 | That's archaeologist Dr. Angela Perry. In conversation with Sadie, a dog. Well, not just any dog, |
| 0:57.2 | the dog of origin stories contributor, Neil Sandell. Well, Sadie looks like she gets out of bed |
| 1:04.3 | every day and never looks in the mirror. She is a bit like an unmade bed, long stretch body, short stubby legs, long snout, messy hair, very rumpled, |
| 1:17.7 | which is really part of her charm. |
| 1:21.3 | Sadie is a wire-haired doxen, nothing at all like a wolf. |
| 1:25.8 | So how on her did this unlikely creature, did any of our dogs for that matter, descend from wolves? |
| 1:33.0 | How is it that dogs were the first domesticated animals? |
| 1:37.3 | Neil Sandell begins his story, originally produced for the CBC show Ideas, with a curious expression he came upon while learning French. |
| 1:47.0 | He asked his friend Sebastian for a little help. |
| 1:54.6 | So what does it mean? |
| 1:58.2 | Entre chain and Lou means this moment of the day where the evening is coming but it's not quite still there. |
| 2:07.6 | It's not clear whether you are in the evening time or in the daytime and it describes also the light which is in between |
| 2:20.3 | in between daylight and evening it's the moment where you hesitate |
| 2:28.3 | the words if you would translate it literally, it would mean between dog and a wolf. |
| 2:43.0 | So where does it come from? I don't know, of course you immediately think that maybe the dog would represent the day and the wolf being the |
... |
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