The Dog Grew a Muscle Just To Manipulate You

The Dog Grew a Muscle Just To Manipulate You Your dog has a muscle above its eye that wolves do not have. Scientists found it by dissecting both, and its only job is to lift the inner eyebrow and make the face you cannot say no to. This is the story of dog domestication told through that one muscle, a fourteen thousand year old grave in Germany, and a hormone loop that runs between our two species and almost nowhere else. All research and sources are linked below. 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES: ▸ The muscle wolves do not have — "Evolution of facial muscle anatomy in dogs" by Juliane Kaminski, Bridget M. Waller, Anne M. Burrows and colleagues (2019, PNAS, Vol. 116, No. 29, pp. 14677–14681) six dogs and four wolves dissected muscle by muscle. The levator anguli oculi medialis, which raises the inner eyebrow, is present in dogs and absent in wolves. The team also filmed nine wolves and twenty seven shelter dogs: the dogs made the movement more often and harder, and the strongest versions came from dogs alone. ▸ The oldest dog burial on Earth — "A new look at an old dog: Bonn-Oberkassel reconsidered" by Luc Janssens, Liane Giemsch, Philippe Crombé and colleagues (2018, Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 92, pp. 126–138) the teeth of the Bonn-Oberkassel puppy carry the signature of canine distemper, caught at around nineteen weeks old in three separate bouts. An animal that sick cannot feed itself or follow a group that has to move. Somebody nursed it for weeks knowing it could never work. The same re-examination found a tooth from a second, older dog in the grave. ▸ The hormone loop — "Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds" by Miho Nagasawa, Shouhei Mitsui, Takefumi Kikusui and colleagues (2015, Science, Vol. 348, No. 6232, pp. 333–336) a dog's gaze raises the owner's oxytocin, the owner answers with touch and speech, and that raises the dog's, which lengthens the gaze. Hand-raised wolves did not hold the gaze, and with no gaze the loop never started in either direction. ▸ The famous fox experiment, reconsidered — "The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome" by Kathryn A. Lord, Greger Larson, Raymond P. Coppinger & Elinor K. Karlsson (2020, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 125–136) Dmitri Belyaev's silver foxes came from fur farms on Prince Edward Island, where they had been bred in captivity for decades. The floppy ears, curled tails and patchy coats usually credited to selection for tameness were already in the founding population in 1959. PEOPLE & SITES MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO: ▸ AU101, the inner brow raiser — Every other muscle in a dog's face does physical work. One closes the jaw, one flattens an ear, one bares a tooth. This one lifts the inner eyebrow and does nothing else. In the wild it is worth nothing at all. It exists because it worked on us. ▸ The Siberian husky — One of the oldest breeds alive, and the one breed in the study without the muscle. If it were simply part of being a dog, the oldest breeds would carry it too. It shows up instead in the breeds that spent the most time in our houses, watching our faces. ▸ The Bonn-Oberkassel grave — Found by accident by workers in a valley near Bonn in 1914: a man, a woman and two dogs, buried together fourteen thousand two hundred years ago. At the end of an ice age, people who counted every calorie kept an animal alive for a month knowing it could never repay them, then buried it with their own dead. ▸ The flat face — The pug, the English bulldog and the French bulldog were shaped by people choosing rounder, more infant-like faces, generation after generation, until the animal often cannot breathe comfortably or give birth without help. Nobody sat down and decided that. Every step was small, and every step made the next one look normal. ▸ The fire — Nobody tamed the wolf. Picture a shape at the edge of the firelight that has been there four nights, will not come closer and will not leave. You throw a bone into the dark, not out of kindness, but so the shape stays where it is. Now run that same night for a thousand generations. The ones that could hold that distance got fed, and the fire did the choosing. No human ever picked a single one of them. Then some of them started watching our faces, and the ones that watched best got fed a little better. That look still works. It worked on you this morning. ____________________ 🎨 Written and illustrated by Ameee ____________________ #dogs #dogdomestication #puppydogeyes #wolves #dogscience #animalbehaviour #archaeology #anthropology #history #evolution #oxytocin #ancienthistory #dogfacts #explainer #education #humanhistory