Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years. Yacold also

partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for

gut health, an investigator-led research program. To learn more about Yachtold, visit yawcult.co.

com.j. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Suzanne Bard.

Dogs began to diverge from wolves tens of thousands of years ago when their wild ancestors started interacting with humans.

Over time, domestication shaped canine behavior, and today, dogs are especially adept at understanding cues from humans. For example,

when a person points at a bull, a pet dog will usually approach it. All kinds of complex pointing

gestures have been tried with pet dogs, and they seem to be good at it. Behavioral biologist

Anandita Badru of the Indian Institute of Science Education

and Research. Wolves are a different story, however. When same experiments are done with

semi-captive wolves, wolves seem to be quite bad at it. So there's this big open question of

how did dogs become dogs. Badru is interested in whether dogs require training to understand cues like pointing

or if the behavior is innate.

Most studies have focused on pet dogs and developed countries, but Badru thinks it's a mistake

to overlook how stray dogs respond to human cues.

In India, we have a huge population of stray dogs.

They are not controlled by humans, and they live on the streets for generations.

So we felt that the free-ranging dogs are a very nice system, which could give us inputs

about what dogs could have been like before they came into our homes, before we made them parts of

our families. For the study, the researchers approached stray dogs on the streets of several

...