The Beatles, now and then.

The last Beatles, out now.

Out now.

This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher in Taliata.

How did dogs become humans best friend?

Well, one idea is that docile wolves flock to waste dumps

near human camps, but there are problems with that idea.

Because why would humans tolerate such dangerous carnivore close to their camping sites?

Maria Latinin is an archaeologist at the Finnish Food Authority and the Natural History Museum in Helsinki.

She points out that hunter-gatherers living during the time of wolf domestication, 14 to 29,000 years ago, also probably didn't stay put long enough

to create generations worth of trash.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, she and her colleagues present a different hypothesis that humans purposely shared their leftovers with wolves instead.

Her team calculated the energy content of common Paleolithic prey, like moose, deer and caribou, and they found there likely

would have been more than enough meat to go around.

Now that's because humans can't survive on protein alone, but wolves can for months.

So Latinin says we might have lobbed the leanest cuts their way.

So this one we would have given to the dogs

and eating the organs and bone marrows and other fatty parts of the animals ourselves.

In other words, the meaty pricey bits we prize today

would have been what our ancestors threw to the dogs.

Latinin says sharing our meat might have sparked a deeper relationship too.

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