From the start, humans have had a hand in influencing not just what dogs look like but also how they behave. Dogs were domesticated around 20,000 years ago, which gave us plenty of time to tinker with our new-found friends, selecting for attributes that made good hunters, guards and herders as well as loyal companions.
Dogs have long been bred for very specific behavioral traits—hunting breeds excel at tracking, pointing and retrieving while herding breeds have highly developed stalking and chasing skills. How all those variations came about is what researchers have been busy studying since the first dog genome was sequenced in 2005.
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via Whisker Therapy