Question: what arethe realtions between dogs and humans

Joanna Bryson answered on 20 Jun 2013:

Dogs aren’t very related to humans in terms of genes, but dogs have been living with humans for a very long time – a new genetics paper from China indicates it might be 32,000 years! That’s three times longer than people have had farms or cities or writing! That’s so much time that dogs and humans have probably both evolved so we can work better together, and so we can understand each other better. Dogs are better at cooperating with people than chimpanzees are, even though chimpanzees are smarter! That’s because humans are naturally much more cooperative than chimpanzees, so chimpanzees don’t expect to cooperate that much, but dogs know that humans will help them if they help back.

Here is a really interesting web site of a group looking at the difference between dogs and wolves, which wolves are basically dogs that didn’t evolve to live with humans. Unfortunately, right now it’s only in German (it’s from Vienna, Austria). http://www.wolfscience.at/