Intrinsically ball retrieving wolf puppies reveal standing ancestral variation for human-directed play behaviour

Abstract

Domestication dramatically alters phenotypes. Standing variation among ancestral populations often drives phenotypic change during domestication, but some changes are caused by novel mutations. Dogs (Canis familiaris) engage in interspecific play with humans and it has specifically been suggested that the ability to interpret social-communicative behaviour expressed by humans is a novel dog-specific skill. Thus, wolves (Canis lupus) are not expected to engage in interspecific play with a human based on social-communicative cues. Here we report the observation of three eight week-old wolf puppies spontaneously responding to social-communicative behaviours from a stranger by retrieving a ball. This unexpected and novel observation has significant implications for our understanding and expectations of the genetic foundations of dog behaviour. Importantly, our observations indicate that behavioural responses to human social-communicative cues are not unique to dogs. This suggests that, while probably rare, standing variation in the expression of human-directed behaviour in ancestral populations could have been an important target for early selective pressures exerted during dog domestication.