Dogs Twice Domesticated

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

So, the Irish may have domesticated dogs? Cool. Takes away the sting of other Irish inventions - waterproof teabags, inflatable dartboards, the fire alarm with a snooze function...

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

I suspect wolves were semi-domesticated in multiple places where hunter gatherers and wild wolves coexisted. But in most cases the domestication may not have gone so far as to establish a large population of domesticated wolves that were bred completely separately from the original wild population, so:

1. They mostly couldn't drift very far from being indistinguishable from wild wolves. Only a few could.

2. Because the overall population of all domesticated wolves were small, when on the rare occasions when multiple domesticated populations interbreed, genetic drift would have a high chance of randomly allowing some sets of genes to predominate over the rest, thus obscuring the multiple origins of domestication.

Just my theory.