It's been said that a dog is man's best friend. This might be true, but why? How is it that this particular animal developed such a special relationship with humans?

How did they go from being wild to domesticated? And how is it there are so many different breeds of dogs that all came from the same original source?

Learn more about the domestication of dogs and how it happened

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The story of humans and dogs goes the very first animal

were hunters and gatherers. Dogs were the very first animal ever

domesticated by humans. They were domesticated long before horses, cattle, sheep, or

even cats.

Whenever we go back that far, details become sketchy because we have no written or even oral records.

It was the onset of DNA analysis that gave us our first real glimpse of when dogs were first

domesticated and where they probably came from. The domesticated dog has the

scientific name Canis lupus familiaris. One of the most shocking things about domestic dogs that not everyone knows is that all domestic

dogs are the same species.

As radically different as dog breeds are, they are all fundamentally the same thing.

A 120 pound Irish wolfhound is the same species as a 5 pound chihuahua.

This is seen in the fact that different breeds of dogs can interbreed with each other.

One of the definitions of a species, although it can be a bit fuzzy around the edges,

is the ability to breed with other members of the same species. Birds might look as

different from one another as dogs do, but birds don't interbreed. The closest

living wild relative of domestic dogs are gray wolves or timber wolves. Today they can be found in

North America and Northern Eurasia. The point when dogs genetically split off

from wolves occurred about 20 to 40,000 years ago.

This was around the last glacial maximum.

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